Shortly after the last blog post published, I received a few prototype photos from Ray Breyer. These are great additional resources to help anyone follow Fenton Wells’ kitbash for the Southern 40-foot, double-sheathed, truss rod box car project.
Ray’s photos remind us of options for additional roadnames on these cars.
The Southern controlled the Mobile & Ohio and often added similar freight cars to the M&O fleet. The image above documents one of these cars in the later GM&O lettering with a 1953 weigh date stencil and AB brake hardware.
Here’s another GM&O car that appears to be wearing fresh paint and lettering with AB brake hardware and 1951 weigh date and repack stencils.
A couple of builder images are found in the Westerfield Models AC&F collection. These document the original M&O appearance with the half-door for automobile service and a different steel end.
The B end view highlights the details that differ from the Southern prototypes.
Now we come back around full circle to Fenton’s original model project. Above is a 1923 Baltimore Car & Foundry builder photo of the original Southern 40-foot automobile box cars. It was the later modifications of these cars that inspired Fenton’s modeling in the previous blog post. I have a feeling he will be working on a GM&O version soon.
Whether you model the late steam post-WW2 era, or the mid-1920s into the 1930s, these are a couple of prototypes you can kitbash in HO scale from Westerfield Models kits and parts.
Many thanks for Ray Breyer for sharing a few prototype image files. We hope these inspire more kitbash projects following Fenton Wells’ lead to build versions of these interesting prototypes.
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