Gondolas on the railroad!

Gondolas on the railroad! 

The APRR has one industry that’s designed for gondolas, and that’s Shapeless Steel. It’s a modified Walthers structure that was originally designed as an engine building or car shop. Based on the design of my layout, it fits just fine. 

During both live operating sessions and my virtual operating sessions, gondolas move in with empties and outbound loads with coils, flat steel sheets and pipes. 

On the virtual operating session side, I have my APRR and EBRR gondolas in 40’ and 50’ lengths, all custom painted by my friend Sir John of Georgia, as well as some other gondolas from the Penn Central.

When I’m not doing my virtual op sessions, I have a number other gondola cars, including some coil cars, all made by Atlas.

Recently I picked up a number of gondola cars for the layout. First batch that I picked up were kits from Scaletrains.com. They introduced these back in 2021 called the CB&Q Havelock Shops 52’6” gondolas in kit form for a very reasonable price, in my opinion. The first batch that I bought were in road names Conrail and Burlington Northern. The next run I picked up cars in Milwaukee Road, Chessie/B&O, CB&Q, and the DM&E. Some of these I can use in my virtual op sessions as fill for trains. The rest can be used for my operating sessions.

Here's a little history on these freight cars (courtesy Wikipedia): 200 Class GM-6A 52' 6” Gondola were built in 1967/1968 by Burlington's Havelock Shops just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. The key spotting features are the top chord that ran between the grab irons as well as flat sill plate that ran between the bolsters.

I noticed that Atlas released a number of Evans 52’ gondolas in a number of roads, including Bethlehem Steel and US Steel. They looked good, so why not? They would go great with my Steel structure. Only thing is - - there’s no prototype for them! Atlas decided to take a prototype car and tell everyone these are ‘what if they had them’ paint schemes. I’m not that picky or a prototype modeler, so I bought them.

A little background on the gondolas as there were many manufacturers of these rail cars(courtesy Wikipedia): The work horse of the steel industry, the gondola is basically a flat car with sides, allowing more and different types of loads to be transported. The gondola dates to about 1830 and was first used on early railways and tramways to move coal.

Here’s a photo of these gondolas making a move from Rock Ridge Yard to Shapeless Steel.

AP Train 201 with a string of gondolas from Rock Ridge Yard to Shapeless Steel. 

I would like to end this blog post and thank Sir John who has given me the inspiration to post some new things going on the APRR.

So, THANK YOU SIR JOHN!!