Greetings, To all of you interested I have attached a PDF document containing the complete listing of the 481 early Charles Ro and USA Trains American Series Woodside Double Sheathed Billboard Refrigerator Cars from R1600 Swift Refrigerator Line to R16355 Golden Velvet Beer. At this time 3 reefers are unknown R1602, R1606 and R16008. If you know anything about these and any errors in my list I would appreciate your feedback. Thanks
solase, Thank-you for your added info on USAT Reefers, I know you stated you collect these, Do you also run any of your trains?
Solase Many thanx for your time invested in this list, what an asset that list is to USA collectors like myself. Do you happen to have a list like this for USA Piggyback cars by any chance? I noticed you are from Canada, do you run Canadian roadname trains? I like the red paint scheme of the Canadian Pacific railroad. If you read my thread I left some info for canadian road name trains and where to buy them, but you would probably know more than I would on that subject.
Not at this time. I'm strickly an arm chair model railroader. Perhaps in the future I may have a layout but nothing anticipated for the next 5 years.
I don't have any other lists except for this one. I only got the reefer madness bug - thank God. I have an extensive collection (200+ items) of G Scale USA Trains and Aristocraft in Canadian Pacific and Canadian National from the golden era of railroading. I'm adding a few Canadain pieces here and there when I can find them from Algoma Central, Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo and Pacific Great Eastern. Do you also collect USAT R16 series cars? Do you have any spares?
I have a collection of USA R16 woodside reefers I was planning on using when I can afford to buy the USA Hudson which won't be any time soon, but still saving. Art Knapp in Canada has a nice selection of Canadian USA and Aristocraft road name trains including some special limited edtions not anounced in any catalogs, here is there site >>>> www.artknapptrains.com/ Oddly enough he was the one to bail me out when I was looking for the Rio Grande USA SD40-2 in Road numbers 5379 and 5380 which have been long discontiuned. USA was planning on coming out with new Rio Grande SD40-2 locmotive numbers 5381 and 5382, but the deal fell thru, don't know why, but doesn't matter I have my dream triple header now thanx to art Knapp in Canada.
False alarm False alarm!! thought I found one of the missing # come to find out trainshowcase has a # TS 16008 Nevermind??
You're correct that reefer is a custom run done for TrainShowCase from Las Vegas. Here is a pic of it.
Pictures of USA R1600 reefers I posted some catalog pictures of the USA R1600 series reefers in my section, here is the link > www.trainboard.com/grapevine/showthread.php?p=539807&posted=1#post539807
Missing reefer from list??? I wrote the person who has this car for the stock # he stated USAT didn't put numbers on the boxes of their cars??? which we know isn't completely true but anyhow could this be one of the missing reefers on solase's list my guess would be #16008 Rd # 103 wooden shoe laeger
Route 66, great find. I know that I have run into personally that sometimes on some Charles Ro products there were no numbers on the boxes and back then Charles Ro also used little stickies with the part number on it instead of print stamping the box like USA trains does now and the stickies would fall off from age. So maybe this is why I thought the same that sometimes Charles Ro forgot, it's that the stickie glue dried up and the stickie fell off. I myself have bought a few older Charles Ro products that had the stock number hand wrote in by the hobby shop due to this problem.
EMD,I"m sure you are correct that the sticky tag adhesive let loose that is why the # is missing so as to the 3 missing #'s from solace's list we can only guess which one it is
EMD,I"m sure you are correct that the sticky tag adhesive let loose that is why the # is missing so as to the 3 missing #'s from solace's list we can only guess which one it is Route66: I'm afraid so, for some reason I'm missing those exact stock numbers out of my 1998 USA Trains catalog. USA really never kept good records of what part numbers were produced and how many were made. USA trains will not be able to help because when the company was Charles Ro they were 4 digit part numbers with a letter R in front such as R1600 for example. When the company became USA Trains those stock numbers were changed to 5 digit numbers like they are today, but all records of thos 4 digit numbers were lost. The earliest USA catalog I have is 1998, but that would be the first year the company became USA Trains. I'm not even sure if there was such thing as Charles Ro catalogs because I have never seen any. right now I'm like you, still investigating and learning about USA trains. So right now we just have to guess.
Roll The Dice!!.... EMD, I guess will just have to Roll The Dice as they say since I think there are more reefers out there than we really know about considering special events and special runs,they will put out what ever sells here is another example of that non- existant documentation on Reefers. In the long run the hunt is what it's all about. Example:
Some Candidates The early numbers in the series didn't have trust-rods. Possible candidates for R1602 and R1606 are: Banana Distributing, Anheuser-Busch and Evansville Packing. Does anyone know the provenance of any of these reefers?
Evansville Packing Co. There are 2 reefers quite similiar in appearance. One is R16304 and the other is an early release from Charles Ro. I presume it's an early release because it doesn't have truss-rods.
Pacific Co-Operative Poultry Producers Once again we have duplicates from USA Trains. The first is R1680 and the second is R16302 both Northern Refrigerator Car Co.'s Pacific Co-Operative Poultry Producers. Even the reporting mark is the same.
