All --
So far I have sat back and watched the debate on the SAL B-7. But I can stay
silent no longer. There are two things here that really bother me:
1. I thought I would never say this, but here I am agreeing thoroughly with
John Degnan. And disagreeing with Carey Probst and others. Let me give you a
little personal history before I get to my point.
I started in S scale at the age of ten when my folks gave me an AF Hudson set
to
replace the Lionel O-27 train that I gave to local Chinese immigrants. I
immediately began looking in model magazines to find scale-like equipment to go
with my Flyer stuff. At age 12 my folks bought a house with a basement, so I
had space for a layout. At 13 I built my first scale kit -- an Ambroid ACL
watermelon car. (I still have it.) This car was fitted with Northeastern
sprung trucks with hirail wheelsets and Stewart scale dummy couplers. I built
my layout with Tru-Scale milled roadbed and code 125 brass rail. I taught
myself to build turnouts. By age 16 I had my second basement layout. All my
cars had either dummy or operating scale couplers, but still sported the hirail
wheelsets. In my college years, whenever I was home on vacation, I gradually
converted all my equipment to scale wheelsets -- even the old AF.
Why am I telling you all this? Simple. There were an awful lot of us S
scalers
back in the 1960s and 1970s who were not afraid to modify and build. Our
objective was to have realistic equipment on realistic track. We viewed AF
merely as a starting point for realistic equipment. And any time a new kit
came
out (mostly from Kinsman scale models), there we all were, buying and building
them. Today everything is different. The vast majority of S people are
hirailers or tinplaters with little interest in building kits. The vast
majority of these people will never build anything. Based on some of the
remarks regarding the SAL B-7, most are not even willing to convert a scale car
to hirail -- assuming they'd actually build the kit in the first place.
Now to my main point: The detail that has to be compromised if a manufacturer
were to make a kit or a built-up model) compatible with hirail wheelsets and
AF-compatible couplers are the following:
1. Repositioning underbody cross-bearers and/or making them shallower so as to
provide clearance for the larger flanges.
2. Eliminating the coupler pocket and air brake piping.
3. Modifying end-sill detail so as not to interfere with the large
AF-compatible couplers.
4. For longer cars, narrowing the center sill to provide sufficient truck
swing
for operation on 20-inch curves.
5. Use smaller stirrup steps at the ends of cars in order to cope with the
wider truck swing (as SHS does with their house cars).
I would think that the modeler who would actually build the B-7 car kit for
operation on a hirail layout would certainly have the skills to make these
changes himself instead of expecting the manufacturer to provide alternate
parts
for him. Therefore, I believe most of our e-list members who espouse
"backward-compatibity" wouldn't buy the kit no matter what.
2. Gathering and bookkeeping orders for the B-7. It has been difficult for me
to track what's happened here because there was not a continual drumbeat for
reservations on the S-scale e-list (or elsewhere). As one who has spearheaded
several sucessful projects on this e-list and elsewhere, I have to tell you
that
there needs to be someone to act as chief bookkeeper/drum-beater. I guess this
is what John tried to do, but I do not recall seeing periodic notices that
said,
for example, "all we need are 'X' more subscribers and we are a go."
If we really want a SAL B-7, someone needs to come forward as chief
drum-beater/bookkeeper and restart the project. Otherwise, we're just
hand-wringers.
Finally, let me say something about the ubiquity of foreign-road equipment on
any given railroad in the mid-20th century (the era of the B-7): Every
railroad's cars appeared on every other railroad. The appearance of
foreign-road cars was pretty much proportional to the total number of cars each
railroad owned. There were lots of NYC, SP, PRR, and UP cars everywhere. But
you could even see, for example, WA&G, KO&G, and FW&D cars thousands of mles
away from their respective homes. There were (and still are) no
transcontinental American railroads, yet freight cars never had to be unloaded
and reloaded at interchange points. The cars just trundled onto foreign-road
rails. The SAL was no podunk operation; SAL cars were pretty common
everywhere. After all, the SAL ran freight trains a thousand miles from the DC
area to many Southern cities all the way down through Georgia and Florida on a
beautifully-maintained double-track main line. You can't really model your
favorite railroad effectively without a significant percentage of foreign-road
cars -- including SAL.
Dick Karnes
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