TT Scale. The Ideal Scale.

There are a lot of railroads in the USA.
I need to know, what were the rules for usage of "foreign" wagons and locomotives (in 1950s, 1960s)
For example, if I have boxcars marked as D&RGW, locomotives of DSS&A and Burlington, and crane of United Pacific - can they meet together on any station and/or in one train?
Or it's impossible?

arseny

rolling stock roamed freely all over the US network, and into canada and mexico too, i believe, as long as it complied with rules regarding interchange. so, for example, a boxcar with archbar trucks, after a certain date, might be restricted to the home railroad and could not be interchanged and used elsewhere. the railroads had a system of fees worked out to compensate each other when they used another road's wagons.

locomotives, well you'd often see track sharing agreements between two railroads or interchange in yards where you'd see the locos of two roads side by side. or they'd run a service together so for example, the premier freight train of the central railroad of new jersey (CNJ) would have erie lackawanna locomotives on it.

also railroads often leased power from related lines, or brokers who specialised in leasing. so for example you could see ex-richmond, fredricksburg & potomac F7s in their handsome blue and silver scheme, but owned by a leasing company, on the lehigh & hudson river up in new jersey.

sometimes railroads bought locos secondhand and were too poor to repaint them, eg rock island who bought GP7s from the D&RGW and new york central subsidiary, P&LE, and E and F units from the UP.

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... ?id=640359

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... id=1389790

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... ?id=466778

when railroads merged, you'd often get a great variety of locos in different colours side by side. some railroads didn't bother to repaint equipment fast, or they didn't have the cash, so for example, the illinois central gulf continued to have gulf, mobile & ohio red diesels on trains about twenty years after IC and GM&O merged.

whether burlington and DSS&A locos ran together, i doubt it, but it is possible in theory. you'd need to check the history of the individual railroad.

a UP crane, burlington locos and D&RGW boxcars could probably be seen, in theory anyway, at afew places as these were large railroads that interchanged in a few places.

ben

Ben, thank you!
I think, "possibility in theory" will be enough for me. ;)

Shortest way to say it: boxcars and most freight cars - if they existed at the same time, there's a chance they were in the same train at some point!

Boxcars, gondolas and flatcars are easy - mix and match (almost) freely, if they are from the same time period!

And: usually only about 10-15% of the freight cars on your layout should be your "home road" - that is, if you model the Burlington - have maybe 10-15% Burlington freight cars. The rest - from various other railroads in USA, a few from Canada, even maybe one from Mexico.


Locomotives: depends when. Before the 1980s, mixing locomotives wasn't common, unless the two railways were related companies. You might see a UP loco on a D&RGW line if UP had permission to run along the line, but not two in the same train (unless one was brand new being delivered). Nowadays, you can see all sorts of big mixups - I've seen even NS locomotives here in Vancouver!

UP and Burlington did meet in quite a few places, so you may have seen a UP crane with a Burlington locomotive - if the Burlington had an accident in an important place, and the UP crane was close by, they might rent it!!

Arseny wrote:There are a lot of railroads in the USA.
I need to know, what were the rules for usage of "foreign" wagons and locomotives (in 1950s, 1960s)
For example, if I have boxcars marked as D&RGW, locomotives of DSS&A and Burlington, and crane of United Pacific - can they meet together on any station and/or in one train?
Or it's impossible?

Hi Arseny, The first rule is they call them cars here instead of wagons. and most freight cars went where ever the loads needed to go so if you can find a reason for a D&RGW boxcar to be on NYC tracks then it was possible. Traffic patterns made certain cars more likely to be found far away, PFE( UP & SP) reefers hauled lots of fruit and vegetables to the east coast but SP hoppers very rarely hauled that far as there were closer local sources for rock and cement. SP boxcars hauled lots of lumber south thru california then east. Eastern roads shipped lots of machinery to the west. Florida shipped lots of orange juice north, etc.
In the 50's locomotives stayed pretty much on their home rails compared to today where they go all over the place. A crane car is a maintenance of way car so would only be found on it's home road under normal circumstances. In the 50's railroad still had large company owed MW fleets and personnel, now days most of that stuff is contractor owned and supplied. .....dave

Another thing to keep in mind as far as the freight cars go, is that after the car was emptied, most often the car was NOT sent back to the railway that owned it - instead, it was used as needed, which meant that a certain car might be away from its home rails for a year or more. There were a lot of rules governing this, of course; one specified that a foreign car should be sent *towards* its home rails if possible; but often this rule was ignored, and the car was used for whatever it was needed. So, cars went everywhere on the continent!

There were only two real exceptions to that generalisation:

1, Canadian and Mexican cars were almost always sent back to Canada or Mexico, due to customs restrictions. However, there were exceptions to this as well - I've seen a few instances where Canadian cars got "trapped" in South Carolina during the cotton harvests, because cars were needed, and it was at hand.

2, Cars in "captive service". Certain cars were assigned to specific duties, for example, maybe the boxcars numbered 1000 to 1050 of AB&C Railroad were assigned to shipping engine blocks from a foundry in Indiana to the Ford factory in Detroit; these cars would be used ONLY in this service. Cars in such "captive service" were always marked as such clearly, and I don't know of any cases where captive service cars were used elsewhere besides their assigned duty.

The "mix and match" of cars going all over the continent applies mostly to boxcars, gondolas and flatcars - cars which can be used for almost any kind of shipment. Other kinds of cars were more specific as to what they could carry, and so their geographic distribution was considerably more limited. Of course, even there there were exceptions - I've seen a photo of a Milwaukee Road stock car on Long Island in New York!

Nice!
Thank you, everything is clear!

The reason of my question: I've won some items on Ebay: old HP locomotive painted as DSS&A, and some Maisto locomotives and wagons. Also I am waiting for Gold Coast boxcars. And I wanted to know, if I can use them together without re-painting (I am a poor painter)
Also I've bought the Bachmann's N scale crane, painted as UP, and put it on TT-gauge Peresvet's bogies, like here.
Ok, it will be the "emergency rented" crane. ;)