Large Scale Central

Fallen Flag and other old road names.

General Discussion
#1

One of my favourite pastimes, when taking a break from garden work, running trains or other maintenance work is to look at a few Stateside web cams. Lady Liberty, Times Square, Milwaukee harbour are some but the railroad ones - Roanoke VA, Landgraff WVa an the two at Chesteron IN do throw up some rolling stock surprises.

I often see names of roads long since merged with current Class 1’s and this in some instances is more than twenty years ago since the merger. For instance, running through the Pocahontas division at Landgraff WVa the other day were large covered hoppers bearing the names of SOO Line and C&NW. There are many cars lettered Southern, Burlington Northern, Norfolk & Western and Santa Fe to be seen which, as far as I can see, does give us large scalers a fairly large window in which to set our time frame. Whilst I have tried to keep my time within the 1950 - 1970 period - a good time if you run Aristo and some Bachmann modellers licence is not always needed it would seem.

The exception to all the above is coal cars. They tend to be all post 1980 construction - leased or marked N&S (a few Southern now and again) but no Aristo 2bay offsets in sight.

#2

No the 2 bay and 3 bay cars run on the short-line here, and haven’t been repainted in so long, the faded names are almost lost in the overall rust colour of the cars. Some even still have the faded ACI plates on them, but they would be impossible to read at this point.

#3

On my most recent railfan trip through Nebraska I caught a very rusty 3 bay ACF Missouri Pacific hopper with the original reporting marks and herald. There wasnt much color to the herald left, it was really a neat catch.