I am currently working on putting together a unit coal train for Southern. Being relatively new to this, I find there are few models available from manufacturers so I'm painting and decaling them myself. A lot of fun. However, as I look for photos on the web of prototypes from the early '70s, I'm finding a wider variety of coal hoppers from Southern than I thought existed. In fact few if any even resemble the unpainted models I got from Atlas. Can anyone recommend a definitive reference book that details Southern's stock of coal hoppers (makers and varieties)?
I believe the Southern Railway Historical Society published a set of two diagram books covering all of Southerns equipment... while lacking in detail (they're very basic general arrangement drawings), it would be a good start. There were three builders of Southern unit-train hoppers (100T hoppers)... Pullman-Standard, Greeneville, and Ortner. The P-S and early Greenevile hoppers were similar to each other... and fairly unique to Southern. These cars were rebuilt by Bethlehem-Johnstown in the mid 80s (new sides and chutes), so finding an original picture online will be difficult. No model of these hoppers exist in any scale that I know of. Rebuilt version: Greeneville did build a more standard appearing hopper for Southern from 1978 to 1982... like this: The Ortner cars however, are your best bet, with a slight caveat. Models exist in N and HO, but they're the 5-bay car... Southerns Ortners lacked the middle bay. The first Southern Ortners were built in 1973, so that may be early enough for your time period...
Thanks Robbman for the great info! I've also seen some other pictures of hoppers with arched or peaked ends. Any info on those? When you mention that there are 3 builders of unit train hoppers and Ortner built the earliest in '73, does it mean that Southern didn't begin unit coal deliveries until then? I'll work on tracking those books down. Thanks again, Dan
Southern invented the unit-train concept in 1960, these trains used the 'Silversides' class GS-1 aluminum 110 -ton gondolas, built by Pullman-Standard that year... these 750 gons pretty much held down the unit train fort for years... (Southern had nine unit trains in operation by 1972...) In 1966, a transloader was built at Appalachia, VA that took the smaller 50-70-ton hopper runs from local mines and rotary dumped them into storage bins for eventual loading into Silversides (for transport to Duke Powers' Belmont and Plant Marshall in NC)... a pretty neat concept back then. The first P-S 100-ton hoppers, nicknamed 'Big Reds', were built in 1964 and 1966, and were first used in unit train service in 1967. There's a picture of one of these as built in the Pullman-Standard Color Guide to Freight Equipment, The Decade of Color:1960-1970 by James Kinkaid, published by Morning Sun Books. In 1968, a unit-train ran by the Southern to Georgia Power featured a rarity, mine-leased and supplied cars (Consilidation Coal Company)... The first (of many) Ortners were built in 1973 for further unit-train operations... The smaller 50 to 70 ton cars were still around and used in regalur service, with the 50-55 ton cars eventually getting phased out in the mid-70s or so... only 127 still existed at the time of the NS merger, and they were removed from service in 1983.
How about the forthcoming 70 ton hoppers from Athearn?10 road numbers from a series of cars built in the late fifties and were still around in the seventies.Idon't know how accurate these will be but they look to be close from the artwork.
