ORER – April 1956

Purchasing this ORER was one of the first steps in focusing my modeling efforts. For those that do not know about these, they list all the revenue freight cars for every railroad at the time of their publishing, Every one.

I used to refer to this as the “Bible for Modeling.”

When I was modeling the Elmira Branch in the late Spring of 1956, a car had to be listed in here or it did not belong on the railroad.

The information here is different then just knowing a railroad had the car, it tells you haw many they had on the roster at that time. That is very important information for trying to get the right proportions of cars modeled.

ORER – October 1953

When I made the switch to model the Reading I researched what locomotives I wanted to model and found the point in time that had the most of them on the roster at the same time. This turned out to be the middle of 1953. So I needed a “New Bible.”

This ORER for October 1953 shows different cars on the roster than the April 1956 ORER does. Just three yaears difference and there is a big difference in the cars which were retired by 1956 and the classes that were being built to replace them.

ORER – January 1952

This is now the “Bible” for my railroad. If it’s listed in here than I can have it on the railroad.

It’s also is the heart of the “By the Number” idea for modeling freight car fleets. It more important to know how many cars of a particular design a railroad owned as of Jan 1952, then just know that they owned them.