The Penn Gulf Story

One of the essential elements of protolanced (PL) lines is setting a formal roster of both motive power and rolling stock. The thrust of this article focuses on rolling stock rosters.

Since believability and realism depend on consistency, it is vital that a numbering system for a Proto Lanced railroad be developed for the roster. There are a number of options available for deriving numbering systems to organize a roster, and these are a couple:

A. Select an existing, actual railroad's roster and use its numbering system as a basis for your own line. This is most easily done by consulting Official Railway Equipment Registers (ORERs), and these will provide insight on cars appropriate for that period as well.

B. Create a numbering system that reflects the evolution of car development. Box cars, gondolas, flat cars and hoppers would fill the lowest numbers and later cars like covered hoppers, auto racks and so forth would fill upper level numbers.

One of the things to keep in mind on more modern roads (1960 forward, I will say somewhat arbitrarily) is the concern of computers mistaking rolling stock for motive power. When I created the Penn Gulf rolling stock roster, I decided that all rolling stock would have six digits. This prevents any possibility of such an error, since motive power would have, at the most, four digits. The Southern, for example, used a check letter at the end of motive power numbers to clue the computers that it was a locomotive, not a piece of rolling stock.

Some roads retained cars with numbers the same as motive power numbers, four digits or fewer. I have to admit that I do not know how they differentiate it on paperwork, but clearly they do. I recall that as late as the 1970's the CNW still had a 40' box car with car #1. It was quite the celebrity, drawing lots of cameras! Since the Penn Gulf desires to move freight first and attract railfans second, the six-digit system for numbering rolling stock was chosen. Once that was decided upon, it became a question of where to place which equipment.

Naturally, a roster must include Maintenance Of Way (MOW) equipment. The ORERs are mum on this point, though, because they only list revenue equipment. We are thus forced to fall back on either observation/experience or imagination. I elected to combine the two by my observations of CSX MOW-assigned motive power. When CSX painted certain motive power "safety orange", they also renumbered the units into the upper reaches of numbering, the 9900s. That idea also made sense for the MOW equipment for the Penn Gulf.

It made the numbers distinctive for the crews to immediately know that if it were a 9XXXXX car, it clearly was MOW. Since cars often go into MOW service in full paint with only the road number changed (frequently done on the CSX and its predecessors), the number needs to clearly state "I am not a revenue car anymore", and the 9XXXXX does just that.

With the MOW equipment set, it seemed appropriate to account for the revenue roster in ascending order, from the 1XXXXX series up in blocks of similar equipment. Just as 9XXXXX shouts "MOW", any 1XXXXX series car equally states "box car". It just seemed that mixing different types of cars within the same prefix would defeat one of the reasons for rosters: making car recognition simple, even when holding a sheet of paper without looking at the car.

It then falls to the second, third, or even fourth numeral in the number series to more clearly differentiate the car from those similarly numbered. On the Penn Gulf roster, for example, the number series will differentiate the cubic feet of otherwise similar cars. The 200XXX series represents the 4600CF Centerflow 3-bay cars, and the 210XXX series represents the 4650CF Centerflow 3-bay cars. To a casual railfan, the difference might be negligible, but a shipper may need the higher-cubic-foot car to handle a bulkier load (soybeans) that weighs the same as another more dense commodity (rice, perhaps). Car usage dictates that the two be clearly differentiated.

Some shippers may have facilities that dictate the number of gates preferred for speed of unloading, or for the arrangements of unloading gates. If Wayne Feed of Troy, Alabama, has a series of three underground unloading bays under the tracks and leading by conveyor to silos, it would probably require a three-bay car for most efficient unloading. A four bay car would either have the wrong arrangement of gates in relation to the bins and could not unload at all or would have to be shifted during the unloading to properly empty all four of the car's bays. Anything that adds to the time or manpower/switching costs is undesirable, so car assignments matter greatly.

Staying with Wayne Feeds, if the Penn Gulf provided a car from the 220XXX series, a 5051CF Centerflow 4-bay, it would either not be able to be unloaded because the bays would not line up with the conveyor bins, or would have to be unloaded a couple of bays at a time, wasting time and increasing costs. If the Penn Gulf had instead provided a 210XXX series 4650CF Centerflow 3-bay, the car could have been spotted directly over the unloading bins and simply unloaded directly into them with no shifting.

As you can see, one could think that the cars selected for the roster could also influence the operations of the line. More accurately, the businesses along the line will dictate the cars needed to provide service. Additionally, cars leaving the Penn Gulf must be selected to meet the needs of the shipper and the receiver. Cars loaded or unloaded on the line will be dictated by a wide number of factors---which nearly ensures that quite a variety of cars will be needed to create a believable roster for the time and place your line serves.

That leads us to another consideration in creating a roster. Should your roster have cars that are not central to the operations your line focuses on? That depends again on a number of factors. As one example, if your line is a smallish regional or a true short line, you may not have auto racks. Racks are contributed to a pool, and the number of assembly plants and/or new car distribution centers on your line will dictate the presence and ratio of auto racks on your roster and polishing your rails.

Both Jackson, Ms. and New Orleans, La. have new car distribution centers. Both are small, but busy sites, each holding 12-20 auto racks for off-loading at a given time. While New Orleans is the larger of the two, the Jackson site was very, very busy. Interestingly, I have never seen an Illinois Central auto rack even though they have quite a bit of automotive traffic. Mike Budde has created some open IC/ICG auto racks, so they must have at one time, but no more. Many roads were represented at the Jackson site, but far and away the majority were CN and GTW (naturally, since IC has now become part of CN), with some KCS, CP, UP and CSX racks mixed in. Nearly totally absent: BN, BNSF, ATSF and NS.

The New Orleans distribution center/offload site is on the NS. The racks there truly are quite the mix, with NS, UP, CN, CP, CR and ATSF all well-represented. BN, SP, CSX and GTW were less well represented.

If you were to railfan the CSX yard in New Orleans (which I do), you would see large numbers of BN, CSX, UP and SP auto racks, with relatively few from KCS, CN, CP, GTW, NS, or ATSF. CSX does not have an distribution/offload site in New Orleans, so the auto rack traffic represents East/West movement of vehicles and empties, not terminal traffic. It is, however, interesting to see the mix of home/allied/competitor racks in the pools on given lines.

The value of this information in creating a PL rolling stock roster? Observing these behaviors clue one as to what rolling stock should be on your roster based on your road size, traffic handled on and to/from your line, the lines with which you interchange, pools to which you contribute and from which you draw cars, the needs of your shippers. Who you serve will tell you what cars you need to best serve them. Rosters also are not static, so if you model more than one era, you will need to create more than one roster to reflect those changes. Also, you may create space and reserve numbers on a roster for cars you may someday add, or just have them set aside to give flexibility for changes if a group of cars is leased, bought, or if a merger adds to the fleet and has to be renumbered into the existing fleet.

For an example of a rolling stock roster, I will reprint the Penn Gulf initial rolling stock overall road number system for revenue equipment (this is also a separate file on the PennGulfgroup page).

While this number system seems very cut-and-dried, keep in mind that there will be multiple smaller series of numbers used within the blocks and every number may not actually be used. A numbering system and an "absolute" roster are not the same thing. This numbering system is an overview, and with a block there may be cars from different manufacturers that have the same cubic capacity, were bought in batches different years and be similar on a gross, but not detail level. One example would be PS and Trinity/PS covered 4750cf PS2-CDs. Both would be in the same block, but likely would be in different series within the blocks. For example, the Penn Gulf may have bought 8 series of

200 (1600 total) 4750CF PS2-CDs built by PS and listed them as:

260000-260199

260200-260399

260400-260599

260600-260799

260800-260999

261000-261199

261200-261399

261400-261599

and then purchased two series of 350 Trinity-built PS2-CDs and listed them as:

263000-263349

263350-263699

This leaves a gap from 261600-262999 (1400 cars) to expand up from the original series or down from the later Trinity cars if the roster expands through new purchases or second-hand acquisitions/leases. In this way also cars from different orders, with different braking systems (body v. truck mounted brakes, etc.), hatches (round or trough), gates can be differentiated from cars that are similar/identical in cubic feet.

Penn Gulf System Rolling Stock General Numbering Scheme 

Box Cars

40' Box car (sliding door) 100XXX

40' Box car (dbl sldr) 108XXX

40' Box car (cushioned) 110XXX

40' Box car (plug door) 115XXX

50' Box car (sliding door) 150XXX

50' Box car (waffle) 154XXX

50' Box car (cushioned) 155XXX

50' Box car (plug door) 156XXX

50' Box car (dbl sldr) 157XXX

50' Box car (dbl plug) 158XXX

60' Box car (sliding door) 160XXX

60' Box car (plug door) 162XXX

60' Box car (Hycube sldr) 164XXX

60' Box car (Hycube plug) 165XXX

Covered Hoppers (3-Bay or larger)

4600CF Centerflow 3-bay 200XXX

4650CF Centerflow 3-bay 210XXX

5051CF Centerflow 4-bay 220XXX

5700CF Centerflow 4-bay 230XXX

4740CF PS2-CD (or equiv) 250XXX

4427CF PS2-CD (or equiv) 255XXX

4750CF PS2-CD (or equiv) 260XXX

Cylindrical hopper 3-bay 280XXX

Cylindrical hopper 3-bay 285XXX

3000CF covered hopper 290XXX

  Gondolas

50' Fixed-end Gondola 300XXX

50' Drop-end Gondola 315XXX

65' Mill Gondola 325XXX

65' Drop-end mill Gondola 327XXX

Steel Coil Gondola 350XXX

Rotary Chip Gondola 370XXX

Specialty Covered Hoppers

39' Airslide Hopper 400XXX

50' Airslide Hopper 410XXX

2-bay 2000CF covered hop 440XXX

2-bay 2000CF cement hop 442XXX **

2-bay 2000CF sand cov hop 443XXX **

2-bay 2700CF soda ash hop 444XXX **

2-bay 1978CF covered hop 445XXX

Flat Cars

50' Flat car 500XXX

60' Flat car 510XXX

50' TOFC/COFC flat car 520XXX

89' TOFC/COFC flat car 530XXX

40' Pulpwood v-deck flat 540XXX

65' Bulkhead flat car 560XXX

Centerbeam flat car 565XXX

40' Depressed Center flat 595XXX

65' Depressed Center flat 596XXX

Open Hoppers

2-Bay 55-ton open hopper 700XXX

6-bay wood chip hopper 730XXX

3-bay wood chip hopper 735XXX

3-bay 70-ton open hopper 770XXX

3-bay 100-ton open hopper 790XXX

Maintenance of Way (non-revenue service)

4-gate 70-ton Ballast hop 900XXX

Side-dump gondola 910XXX

40' Box car 920XXX

50' Box car 930XXX

40' Bunk car 935XXX

50' Bunk car 936XXX

50' gondola 940XXX

Oil service tank car 950XXX

200 Ton crane 960XXX

Hi-rail crane 964XXX

Hi-rail pickup 965XXX

Dynamometer car 970XXX

Rail inspection car 980XXX

Executive coach 997XXX

Executive diner car 998XXX

Executive observation 999XXX