Moving them Doggies

Just when you think you know your railroad, you stumble on some new information that is trans-formative.  Pacific Electric and you think interurban and a bunch of old Southern Pacific Railroad freight cars rumbling around downtown Hollywood.  That's a lot of it, but as I've hinted in other posts, PE was more than a downtown guy.  Even if you are not interested in urban modeling there's a portion of a line someplace that is out in the sticks.  Doing research on a completely different project I found a photo of a Livestock Car with a PE placard on it.  Wow...

 

PE 8501

Well, I can only assume some fresh meat was delivered via these cars and not the pony's given the availability of more specialized Heavyweight Horse Cars.  This car adds a whole new dimension to my layout planning and an interesting business to research.

These cars were part of the SP S-40-4/5 Stock car order placed in 1912 to replace older 36' cars.  Built by a number of Harriman Companies, Standard Steel Car, Pullman and Ralston Steel Car they were considered revolutionary at the time.  Anyway about 900 of these cars were built and most of the SP combined roads had them including T&NO, PE, SPde Mexico, NWP and several others.  So you can see, once you have a kit you have the opportunity to add some interesting freight options.  From what I got from Tony Thompson's book was that PE had 10 of these cars but as expected little in the way of history or movement.  I wonder if I did a search for slaughter houses in Los Angeles in the 1940's what would come up?  

Here is a scan of the drawings out of an old CBC.  These are also in Thompson's Stock Car book.

Now, how to model it.  I was looking for a scratch building project and though this might be the one, but looking at what was available I found that the Red Caboose makes the S-40-5 and that's pretty close to perfect.  So I saved me some work, but I still have to dig around on line and find what stock is still available.  Two or three will work just fine for me.

Next step is figuring out just how to use these and what kind of business it could serve.  There's no shortage of info on S-40's on line and a few years ago a really nice brass model was made available in O scale by RY Models.  

If nothing else these cars marked in PE will be interesting down at the club and make a nice discussion point for those interested.