It would be nice to see these cars produced as models in their original passenger numbers. Charlie, do you have any approximate date for the two photos of the renumbered cars?

Bill Pollard

I didn’t realize the cars were out from Walthers… nice looking models, but its unfortunate that they didn’t get the color of dimensional data right. It seems that they are plagued by minor detail errors on many models that would have been easy to fix.

The Walthers express boxcars can be seen here: http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/920-101669

Is there much likelihood that there was an oddly painted MP express boxcar from which Walthers took their information? I’ve never seen a car with yellow dimensional lettering, but would like to think that perhaps one car got lettered not according to the paint diagram.

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Walthers had/has similar problems with many of their Rock Island passenger cars and RI troop sleepers, which carry letterboard lettering that is significantly smaller that the prototype. Attention to detail, in a hobby when accuracy is prized, should be a given.

Bill Pollard

Those are my photos, both January 1970 in the 25th St. yard in Wichita. I believe these cars were in hide service, but I’m not sure I can tell you how I know that. Some older 40′ single sheathed cars actually had a ‘hide service’ stencil, but these didn’t. Note that they both have ACI labels.

Ron Merrick

The Wichita slaughterhouse district was just to the west of the MoPac main line, with only the Rock Island and some slum houses in between. The Armour and Swift plants faced west, to the Santa Fe and N. Broadway. Behind them were the pens. To the north was Jacob Dold, which might originally have been served by the Frisco. On the opposite side of the MoPac, facing 21st, was the Excel slaughterhouse and maybe some other meat operations. So the MoPac served a small part of the slaughter industry directly, but had access to the Wichita Union Stockyards through the WTA (Wichita Terminal Association, which still exists), to ship critters in and body parts out.

So in this case, the hides were from cows and sheep mostly. They would have been outbound loads, since I don’t know of any tanneries in the immediate area. A dead critter hide probably smells the same, whether muskrat or bovine.

There would have been outbound tallow loads also, which at least were in tank cars.

Ron Merrick

There was a hide house in Butler, MO. It was still receiving cars in the very early ’80s. It smelled and the cars smelled. As indicated in the other posts, the empty boxes for this commodity were in assigned service. That does not mean that they were restricted to one specific customer location. I’m sure they roamed the system as needed.

The oldheads I worked with talked about conductors making up phony mty waybills for these cars assigning them to a new location. This way they did not have to stop and switch at this olfactory offensive facility. This was prior to the TCS computer system implementation. I don’t know whether any of these individuals were ever caught and disciplined. During my career, this type of shenanigan was not possible due to oversight by the “magic” computer.