P.C.C.M. #54: Mail and Express Ops!

Hello everyone!

Continuing the recent theme of portraying special operations in our blog posts, (we recently covered intermodal and auto industry car movements) our virtual ops community of five layouts is now taking a look at Mail and Express operations!  Admittedly the extent of M&E ops on the Kings Port Division is small to pretty much nonexistent so I had to get creative and pull out some vintage equipment to get involved.  It was fun to come up with something to post and I greatly appreciate conversations I had with fellow modeler John R. regarding these operations which are much more extensive on his New York Central Train Layout. 

To get things started I looked in my box of hardly used rolling stock and pulled out my Mantua PRR baggage car and some Tyco PC passenger cars I painted  to make them look more accurate than their original green striped livery.  

John R. helped validate the decision to employ the PRR baggage car by sending me this quote:

From the Express, Mail and Merchandise Service book Page 38:  "The term baggage car is a bit of a misnomer because, although such cars were certainly used for passenger baggage, their primary use was to carry bags of US Mail and parcels for the Railway Express Agency(REA). They are more accurately called baggage express cars and the AAR classified them as BE."

Here then is a baggage express car on the Kings Port Division having just been loaded.

The car is later seen rolling through Kings Port as part of the "Dewitt Clinton", headed by FP7 #4369

Watch the train cross Ulster Ave at speed in the video below.

Sometime after the dust cleared from the Dewitt Clinton's passing a switcher pulls out an old wood sided REA car for interchange.  This car has been sitting idle in a box for years!  Nice to run it!

Later that afternoon a classic PC oddball consist of GP30 #2228 and GP9B #3836 pulls a short train of TOFCs loaded with mail.  This is my best effort at simulating mail trains composed of Flexi-vans like those featured in Green Frog's PC Volume 4.  The GP30 is one of my recently completed painting projects; a Bachmann shell provided by John R. that was originally decorated as a C&O loco.

Prototype Penn Central GP30/GP9B lashups are featured in JPM's "Railfanning with the Bednars Vol.6 " DVD and are the inspiration for this grouping. 

Mail's here!

But its not only the Penn Central getting involved in M&E operations today.  The freelanced Kings Port & Western gets in the act with its Budd RDC-3 that includes a Railway Post Office compartment along with its 48 passenger seats.  Here the RDC is being loaded at Williams Yard for a daily run up the Mountain Branch to Bloomberg.

The Budd Car later arrives at Bloomberg Station near the Agway elevator. 

John R. mentioned that some of my custom painted KP&W plug door boxcars resemble reefers. Below is a comparison of a photo of a reefer he sent with a pic of one of my cars.  Notice the stirrup near the door on both cars.   John informed me that sometimes after reefers were emptied of their perishable loads they would be cleaned and so called "dry" or non-refrigerated loads would be placed inside, utilizing the refer as a boxcar for commodities that could include mail.

With that possibility in mind I'll end this blog post with KP&W S-12 switcher #34 pulling a string of KP&W reefers to a loading platform at Williams Yard so they can be loaded with mail and sent out on the next KP&W hot shot to its western terminus of Salamanca, NY.

That's it for M&E ops on the Kings Port Division but check the other layout blogs to see what they come up with this time around!

John R.'s New York Central Train Layout 

Neal's Atlantic Pacific R.R. 

John B.'s LF&NW

Brian's Ralston Creek R.R.