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Tinted windows on early streamliners?


webbcompound
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4 hours ago, nathan70000 said:

Yup, on quite a few later streamlined cars as well right up to the Amtrak era. I don't see it modelled very often,

Aargh! A whole set of problems lies ahead of me now. I aim to build cars from the SF (Super Chief, El Capitan); NYC ( 20th Century Limited, James Whitcombe Riley); and PRR (Broadway Limited, Liberty Limited) from 1937-41 Cars are variously Pullman Standard, and Budd; plus PRR betterment, Pullman betterment and NYS betterment. I suspect that I have no chance of finding out which of these had tinted windows, and once they are in they won't be changeable.

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31 minutes ago, webbcompound said:

Aargh! A whole set of problems lies ahead of me now. I aim to build cars from the SF (Super Chief, El Capitan); NYC ( 20th Century Limited, James Whitcombe Riley); and PRR (Broadway Limited, Liberty Limited) from 1937-41 Cars are variously Pullman Standard, and Budd; plus PRR betterment, Pullman betterment and NYS betterment. I suspect that I have no chance of finding out which of these had tinted windows, and once they are in they won't be changeable.

 

I would recommend that you join the groups.io passenger car list (it can be done as email or web based), where you are likely to find experts who can answer your specific questions along with potentially useful stuff in their files or photos section.

 

https://groups.io/g/PassengerCarList

 

 

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American passenger cars is a vast topic, you'd need to invest lots of time and effort if you wanted to model formations accurately. Railroads pretty much had them individually designed to their own specification so even superficially similar cars built by the same manufacturer for different railroads can be quite different.

 

For this reason I tend to use modified/detailed Athearn cars as these are cheap and come up on UK Ebay quite often. Walthers cars look very good but in my experience are terrible runners and derail with alarming regularity. The newer Mainline ones are much better in this regard.

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Actually I'm using historic consist details and Union Sation Sides for my streamliners so I can be pretty confident of the accuracy. For the the havyweights and betterment cars I'm using the usual suspects (and converting where necessary). I know they have problems, but they are close enough. For my pre WW1 British stuff there are the same multiplicity of variations but I demand more accuracy. Why? because there appear to be far more suppliers of the varieties of stock for Britain than for the US. I find this strange. In principle there is a bigger market in the US than the UK, and for the pre groupinmg period in the UK there is just as wide a variety of companies and stock as for the pre WWII period in the US, but yet the range of models for the US is much more limited, and the specialist suppliers much more ephemeral.

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I think North American modellers are much more freight-orientated, as is their prototype. Varnish, as passenger services used to be termed, is just a glamorous side-show. And in recent years the market has been well-served by limited runs of plastic coaches to high standards of fidelity for a particular train in a particular era. Brass models were ever expensive and often unpainted, so required specialist skills to reproduce some colourful and complex liveries. Modern techniques make that a relative breeze. 

 

Back a few decades there was a Pullman-Standard library in multiple volumes, each of which provided scale drawings of each and every coach, or batch of identical coaches, purchased by a particular railroad. There were builders' photographs and seating layouts, including details of the internal layout of the loos. You may manage to find some of these today. The same people went on to do a series detailing Budd and other less-prolific manufacturers, but the copy I bought seemed to be rather less detailed per vehicle than the excellent P-S volumes. I suspect tinted windows would get a specific mention. 

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19 hours ago, webbcompound said:

Why? because there appear to be far more suppliers of the varieties of stock for Britain than for the US. I find this strange. In principle there is a bigger market in the US than the UK, and for the pre groupinmg period in the UK there is just as wide a variety of companies and stock as for the pre WWII period in the US, but yet the range of models for the US is much more limited, and the specialist suppliers much more ephemeral.

 

I look at this(*) Wikipedia entry showing the railways that disappeared with the grouping and I see a very short list.

 

Now I look at the Wikipedia entry for Class I railroads(**) in the US (currently at 7 - 5 American and 2 Canadian that have US operations) and Amtrak.

 

Then I look at the list of former Class I railroads and I see a very long list - far more than the short of pre-grouping UK railways.

 

For that matter, once you get beyond the Class I railroads there are 30 commuter railroads and 700 freight operators in the US currently.

 

* - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_companies_involved_in_the_1923_grouping

** - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Class_I_railroads

 

Now consider (like the trains you are trying to model) that a lot of the popular trains were long distance sleeping trains - with a huge variety of unique to each railroad equipment - and there simply isn't enough paint schemes to make tooling a lot of those passenger cars viable.

 

Then, as noted by Ian above, most US modellers don't model passenger stuff - it is all freight - so your potential market is further reduced.

 

So too much variety chasing too fragmented a market means beyond what is currently available there isn't much that can generate sufficient sales to be a viable model.  Which is why for the most part the only passenger stuff available is a handful of the big name trains from the past or the modern standardized Amtrak stuff - or unique collectible type items like the upcoming Amtrak Turboliner model.

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* - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_companies_involved_in_the_1923_grouping

** - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Class_I_railroads

 

I admit these lists do not seem to compare, but if you burrow down into the UK list you will find a lot of subsidiary companies, and a lot of independents, even at the grouping. On the other hand the US list includes a lot of duplicates where the same company is listed as a Railroad and then as a Railway, and quite a number that went out of business or were absorbed by other companies early on, so although there was a lot of local variety initially there were still only a handfull of major lines and groupings by WW2.

 

That aside there are five times as many people in the US, so for comparabilty the US list would need to be divided by five. I get the feeling that as a proportion of the population there are less modellers in the US than the UK.

 

 

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2 hours ago, webbcompound said:

* - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_railway_companies_involved_in_the_1923_grouping

** - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Class_I_railroads

 

I admit these lists do not seem to compare, but if you burrow down into the UK list you will find a lot of subsidiary companies, and a lot of independents, even at the grouping.

 

Same applies to the US - you would need to go and find lists of Class II and Class III railroads and then all the railroads that didn't meet even Class III criteria.

 

2 hours ago, webbcompound said:

On the other hand the US list includes a lot of duplicates where the same company is listed as a Railroad and then as a Railway, and quite a number that went out of business or were absorbed by other companies early on, so although there was a lot of local variety initially there were still only a handfull of major lines and groupings by WW2.

 

It's difficult to find a list online, but it was more than a handful.  While this website has some duplicates it shows that there was a lot more than a handful of major lines in the WW2 era - just in the Midwest area there was C&NW, ICG, Rock Island, Milwaukee Road, Soo Line, CB&Q, KCS, Monon, Nickel Plate, Cotton Belt, Frisco, Wabash, Katy, DT&I, DM&I and more smaller lines.

 

https://www.american-rails.com/fallen-flags.html

 

2 hours ago, webbcompound said:

I get the feeling that as a proportion of the population there are less modellers in the US than the UK.

 

Sadly there are no numbers, but this seems to be true and I have had a someone in the business say that to me in the past - that there are a lot more modellers in the UK per 100k people than the US - just look at the number of magazines - essentially only 2 in the US - vs the UK, or even the number of manufacturers creating new tooled items.

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