Some interesting general freight to consider

Ok, so locating boxcars used on the FUS was not a problem and both the 50' and 40' are well documented. The 50' car I found was a run of the mill PS2 boxcar with 8' doors...Kadee will do nicely there.  40's are a bit more problematic in that the ones I can find photo's of were built in mexico and are different then any currently on the market.  If you are like me, a Kadee 40' PS will work, but there is a nice write up on Mexilist that walks you through kit bashing them that I will post later.  It might be a good subject for a casting write up.  F&S resin models makes several boxcars that were used down south and I will reference them later as well.

I wanted to post two pictures of some general freight cars that will visit my layout.  NdeM was the government owned railroad starting in 1909 through the 1990's and early on it was called the Mexican Government Railway System or MGRS.  I had a difficult time locating anything on the markings until I came across the Canadian Freight Railcar Gallery ( http://freight.railfan.ca/ )  web site that has a nice listing of Mexican Railroads.  They just happen to feature two builders photos of a gondola and a covered hopper.  The photo's are clear enough to see all the important markings and I think these will make their appearance on the layout soon.

  The Gondola, not sure of the proto at the moment but it was part of the series82000-82134 and am assuming either black or freight car brown.  I'll check in to that.  Build date is 1958

The second is the PS2 two bay hopper and this is a match for the Kadee and others.  The series this belonged to was 81800-81839 with a build date of 1961.

Both of these cars would have roamed most of Mexico before having their markings updated, but given I'm modeling the mid 70's I don't see why I couldn't drop a few of these in as is.

Below are a couple of shots of my newly minted MGRS PS2.  Decals were made on my Alps printer and applied to a undec Kadee HO car.  I posed it in the spur track in the old oil field.  I kept it cleaner than I normally would given the date these ran.  They would have appeared slightly messed up but not trashed. :)