With the new Microscale sets announced recently, I am interested in modeling some Central boxcars. Is there a source that has many boxcar photos in it, or will I need to try to recover them one-by-one? Does anyone have any pics they could e-mail to me? Can anyone suggest HO models appropriate for Central cars? The new Kadee Cars are a wee bit expensive to build a fleet of, so I'd like to stay away from them. Thanks for any assistance.

-- Joe Daniels (kjmcjm@home.com), November 14, 1999

Answers

Allen, Todd and I have plans to provide supplemental information about both the new Microscale decal sets and the Kadee cars on the society Web site and in the Right Way publication. We see this as an ideal use for the power of our new database-backed Web site.

One of the projects that I am putting together for the Web site is a much more detailed usage guide for the decal sets. The information is known (especially by Allen), but there is only so much room for details on the sheet included in the package. The Web site, on the other hand, has acres of room and can be interactive.

During the life of the Central rolling stock painting evolved and the decal set is very rich in the number of permutations that it supports. Allen has painstakingly documented correlations between specific groups of cars on the prototype that had each of the variations in lettering. Allen planned it that there are enough decals on the sheet to complete four different protoype varitions with each decal set.

That is, each decal set should allow a user to create four complete boxcars. One of goals is to provide example four car sets on the Web site so that someone who gets a set of decals can add four prototypically correct cars to his fleet.

Allen and Todd did the majority of the research for the two projects, providing historical information from both Society archives and from their own personal collections. They ceratinly have documents, lettering guides and photographs, but if people can hang in just a little while we can try to support users of the new decal sets through the Web site and save them from responding to each individual request directly.

Ron. Wright

-- Ron Wright (ron@cofg.org), November 15, 1999.