Which mainline are you modeling? In general, aside from the large terminals (Peoria, St Louis, Chicago, etc) there were VERY few “stockyards” along the Nickel Plate. The 1944 shipper’s lists only mention 15 (out of 1015 line items. Of course, I don’t completely trust that list, which doesn’t mention ANY Chicago based online shippers, but does list Peoria shippers. The NKP had track in Chicago, but not in Peoria)
Most of those 15 yards were little more than small stock pens or brokers, with spots for one to three cars at most. Most were no larger than the pen at Boswell, IN:
(NKP 43630 is a 42’ double deck car. Notice the roof over the stock pens: this is a hog business (cows don’t need shade). In 1950 the NKP had twice as many double deck stock cars as single deck (352 versus 180), meaning that the vast majority of online originating stock traffic was hogs.
>>I'll also be searching for livestock watering facilities.
The shipper’s list doesn’t mention any NKP-owned stock yards. Due to the relatively short travel distances on the NKP, and the speed in which NKP freights moved, I highly doubt that the NKP ever had any watering facilities. Because of the high numbers of hog movements, it wouldn’t surprise me if most yards had hog drenchers, but that’s about it (drenchers are essentially big sprinklers. A cut of hog cars would be moved slowly through the sprinklers to drench the sand the hogs would be resting in).
>>I've got a small number of HO NKP stock cars and few from other
>>roads. I'll be trying to buy some more from the granger roads like
>>the CB&Q and the Milwaukee Road, and Swift Livestock Express cars.
I have no idea how accurately you like to model, so don’t take the following out of context: I’m not assuming that you’re a proto modeler, I’m just giving you proto information so you can build realistic stock trains!
Anyway, there are a lot of stock car models on the market, but only six good ones in plastic: the Central Valley NP 40-footer, the Proto 2000 Mathers 40-footer, the Accurail GN 40-footer, the Athearn UP 40-footer, the Intermountain ATSF 40-footer, and the new Red Caboose SP/T&NO 36-footer. Of the five, the P2K, Intermountain and Red Caboose cars are the only really useful ones. There are lots of other VERY good stock car models available, but they’re all resin. Resin cars aren’t really all that hard to build, but they do take some extra time to build and paint.
The Athearn car is a decent model of a UP car that rarely made it east of the Mississippi. The CV and Accurail cars rarely left the Pacific Northwest. If you’re modeling Chicago or St Louis (the two biggest stockyards on the planet) then you can justify a couple of each, but I’d stick to using the Intermountain ATSF car and the Red Caboose SP car, with a sprinkling of Mathers cars.
Again using 1950 as a guide, I wouldn’t worry too much about the ‘granger” roads and their stock car fleets. Besides the Milwaukee, C&NW and Rock Island, there really weren’t all that many granger stock cars out there. The myth is that stock cars basically stayed online, and so you’d only ever see home road cars and cars from roads with direct connections to the home road. The reality is that the nation was broken up into about seven “zones”, and in each zone one or two roads dominated the stock car fleet completely. From what I’m seeing, the zones looked something like this:
Northeast: NYC & PRR
South: Southern
Central Midwest: CB&Q & IC
Upper Midwest: C&NW, MILW, RI
Upper West: GN & NP
Central West: ATSF and UP
South West: SP
In total, there were only 16 roads in the USA with more than 1000 stock cars. Most roads had NONE, and most eastern roads had far fewer than 100. A sampling of the tallies for stock cars looks like this (grangers in bold):
ATSF: 7461
UP: 4386
C&NW/CMO: 3736
MILW: 3690
CB&Q: 3573
SP/T&NO: 3040
PRR: 2315
GN: 2045
NP: 1715
NYC: 1675
MATHERS: 1444 (plus 200-400 leased and under other reporting marks)
MP/I-GN: 1427
D&RGW: 1261
RI: 1207
B&O: 1192
IC: 1100
L&N: 788
SLSF: 729
SLSX (SWIFT): 713
WABASH: 594
MKT: 496
T&P: 495
SOUTHERN: 402
SOO: 395
GM&O: 288
C&O: 272
CGW: 150
ERIE: 82
M&STL: 50
READING: 47
RUTLAND: 20
B&M: 15
Between the C&NW, Milwaukee and Q, they have more stock cars than ALL of the other granger roads put together. True, you would see a few more home road stock cars on home rails, but you’d also see a lot of the big guys too.
Unfortunately, there are a few BIG holes in the types of stock car models available. ATSF is overrepresented, with almost 20 models in resin and plastic. The SP is almost as overly covered with 13 models. There are cars available for the Q, Milwaukee and MP, as well as the NYC, PRR and T&P. But no one has come out with a model for any of the C&NW’s stock cars, let alone the Rock Island or IC (and obviously, nothing for the NKP).
Sunshine has 18 different stock car models covering 12 different roads. Westerfield has around 20, covering 16 roads. Funaro & Carmelengo has three stock car models, but they’re for VERY obscure prototypes: Reading (47), Rutland (20) and B&M (15).
Some stock car models are almost useless. The old Roundhouse 36-footer represents cars that would have been off the rails by 1925. The Walthers stock car (which is also the old Train Miniature car) is a prototype of nothing (no stock cars had Dreadnaught ends, with the exception of a few UP cars). Model Power, Tyco, and Bachmann cars are all poorly done copies of the old Athearn UP stock car.
Looking back to the stock cars you mentioned in your email, you CAN model them all…mostly.
Milwaukee: with 3690 cars, they had the fourth largest stock car fleet (third largest if you split the C&NW and CMO). Both Sunshine and Westerfield have models to cover most of their fleet, which was ALL 36 foot. The Westerfield cars are easier to get ahold of.
CB&Q: at 3573 cars they had the fifth largest fleet. Only Sunshine has ever made a model of their stock cars, which were all 36 feet long before they started leasing them from Mathers after 1958 (and they all came in the post-steam Chinese red scheme). Look for Sunshine kit number 54.5.
Swift: Swift had 713 cars in 1950, all part of the GATC pool of lease cars. 671 were 42 feet long and 42 were 36’ long. No one makes a model of these cars in any scale.
To model the more common 40 foot cars, I’d use F&C’s Reading stock car, kit number 7040:
It’ll need a little work, mainly by adding end diagonal braces. But it’s as close as you can get out of any box.
The 36 footers look like they can be represented with the Sunshine CB&Q stock cars.
NKP: With 532 stock cars, the NKP had a fleet larger than most. By 1950 all but 197 of these cars were 42 feet long, most having been stretched during WWII. As with most roads, no one has made a model of any NKP stock cars.
Modeling the 36 foot cars is pretty simple these days: just repaint a Red Caboose SP stock car:
The end diagonal braces run the wrong way, but I don’t think anyone will really notice that. Double deck doors could be “liberated” from a P2K double deck car kit, which are a dime a dozen on Ebay these days.
Modeling the 40 foot cars will be a real challenge. About the only thing that comes anywhere close to the NKP cars is the new Intermountain ATSF SK cars:
To convert these models into something close to the NKP will be a real bear. About the only thing you can realistically do would be to cut the sides off the body, flip them upside down, and reattach them. Even then, that’s nowhere NEAR an ideal kitbash. Alternatively, you could ignore all rivet detail and scratchbuild a few of these car sides out of .06” L-channel and scale 2x8s.
And as you can see, the Mathers stock cars don’t look anything like the NKP cars, so they’re no good either.
Well, I hope this long-winded email has helped a little. I’m hugely fascinated by stock train operations, partially because I remember being taken to the Chicago yards many times as a little kid in the early 1970s. I’ve always thought that building a model railroad of JUST the stockyards would be a unique thing. I may do something along those lines one of these days, but I need to root around in the Chicago Historical Society files first!
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