Car Pools

 Railroads create pools of cars in order to supply the needs of a particular shipper. Auto parts cars are often likely to be part of a pool, the various contributing railroads contribute cars to the pool in numbers equivalent to their portion of the line haul. Although not STRICTLY considered such, it can be argued that coal hoppers are part of a pool.

I created several pools of cars, cars dedicated to serving one specific industry on my layout. I labeled the car cards to inform the operator that the car was in a pool. The MTY return information on the car card usually listed the industry in question as the return location. 

My first pool of cars was modeled before really understanding the industry and commodity. I painted, and decaled a small group of cars for newsprint loading. I probably will retire those cars sooner rather than later. They do have one large door, the idea was the larger door size would accommodate the large rolls of newsprint AND the forklift that was loading them. For paper loading on AIR2 I’m going to go with 40’ boxcars with 10’ doors.

For Old Dominion Furniture I acquired a pile of MDC outside braced, wood, 50’ boxcars. These I painted and lettered for the AIR, sub-lettered them for Furniture loading, and had custom decals of “ MTY return routing stencils” made, “When empty return car to Old Dominion Furniture, Littlerock, WV.”

For Auto Parts, and use at my Auto Ramp Industry I got more MDC outside-braced wood 50’ boxcars, these had end doors. Again I painted and lettered them for the AIR, sub-lettered them for Automobile service and put them to work.

I created a pool of cars for a scrap dealer on my layout. The qualifications for these cars were they had to be gondolas that fit the Chooch Scrap Loads. I culled my car fleet for these cars, in various road names, printed up new waybills for each with the modified “MTY return routing” and  began servicing “Neilson & Son’s Scrap Metal. I made new scrap loads using the cars in the pool as a template,  so now I’m not just limited to the Chooch scrap loads.

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