The Early Bird Gets the Worms!

Well, sort of.  I'm talking about my HO scale New York Central "Early Bird" service boxcar that I recently updated for the Penn Central era, but it doesn't actually sport the famous "Mating Worms" PC logo.  

Let me explain...

Blog followers will be familiar with the "virtual ops" I run with John (of the New York Central Train Layout fame) and more recently Neal (owner/operator of the Atlantic Pacific R. R.).   For the uninitiated, this involves dispatching trains with cars for consignees on each other's layouts, and representing these car movements by photographing identical cars on our layouts.   Penn Central boxcar #77047, for example, will be photographed "leaving" my layout and later John will photograph his own identical #77047 "arriving" on his layout.   Over the last two years these car movements have become greater in number and more complex as we've acquired more and more cars in common.  

When we started these Penn Central Car Movements (P.C.C.M.s) we only had a few cars in common and took advantage of each to increase the fun.  A couple of them, like a NYC red and gray Pacemaker and the NYC Early Bird car were out of date for Penn Central era operations but we used them anyway.  As our mutual rosters increased we retired cars that didn't fit the era.

Here is my NYC Early Bird car being pulled from a siding on my layout in its last virtual ops round, P.C.C.M. #15.  We're currently involved in P.C.C.M.#40 so its been unused for along time!

I probably would have been content to shelve the car but John recently shared this photo along with a comment about being glad to know that Early Bird cars could be run on Penn Central trains since he owns a few of them.  All credit for the photo goes to John Spring and his collection.

 NYCTL John referred to this as a "down the road project".  Well, it turned out to be yet another example of what he and I refer to as the "virtual ops catalyst"...a motivation to improve things on our layouts with the virtual ops fun in mind...and I didn't want to wait for "'down the road" to get it going.

Within 48 hours I had painted the brown doors on my Early Bird PC green and posted this photo of the old NYC boxcar still generating revenue in the PC era.

John has similar plans for his own Early Bird car #90718 so we can now reintroduce them into the virtual ops.  We've noted that an older car like this isn't suitable for commodities that are "clean loads".  The car will most likely be used for shipping machine parts, oil drums, pallets of cardboard, live stock feed, etc.  

I did an internet search about New York Central Early Bird cars and it shouldn't have surprised me that the first link that came up was a blog entry John wrote back in 2012 abut Pacemaker and Early Bird Service.  I'll attach a link to his post for a little historical background about the cars.

http://newyorkcentrallayout.blogspot.ca/2012/08/pacemaker-freight-and-early-bird-service.html 

Meanwhile I still need to work out some car routing options for this oldie-but-goodie that now fits in our Penn Central era for virtual ops.

Thanks for reading!