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Bluford Shops - 60092 - Open Hopper, 2-Bay, USRA 55 Ton - Pittsburgh & West Virginia - 2 Road Numbers

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N Scale - Bluford Shops - 60092 - Open Hopper, 2-Bay, USRA 55 Ton - Pittsburgh & West Virginia - 2 Road Numbers Image courtesy of Bluford Shops
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Stock Number60092
Original Retail Price47.90
BrandBluford Shops
ManufacturerBluford
Body StyleBluford Open Hopper 2-Bay USRA
Image Provider's WebsiteLink
Prototype VehicleOpen Hopper, 2-Bay, USRA 55 Ton (Details)
Road or Company NamePittsburgh & West Virginia (Details)
Reporting MarksP&WV
Road or Reporting Number2 Road Numbers
Paint Color(s)Black with White Lettering
Coupler TypeGeneric Magnetic Knuckle
Wheel TypeChemically Blackened Metal
Wheel ProfileSmall Flange (Low Profile)
MultipackYes
Multipack Count2
Multipack ID Number60092
Release Date2016-06-01
Item CategoryRolling Stock (Freight)
Model TypeOpen Hopper
Model Subtype2-Bay
Model VarietyUSRA
Prototype RegionNorth America
Prototype EraNA Era II: Late Steam (1901 - 1938)
Scale1/160



Specific Item Information: Pittsburgh & West Virginia had 1,830 of these hoppers. Just 132 miles long, P&WV formed a vital link in the Alphabet Route. Nickel Plate Road picked up traffic at Chicago or St. Louis and forwarded it to the Wheeling & Lake Erie who passed it to Pittsburgh & West Virginia thence to Western Maryland for Baltimore or they could pass it on to Reading for Philadelphia or Reading’s eastern connections such as Jersey Central for the New York metropolitan area, or Jersey Central could hand it off to Lehigh & Hudson River who would hand it over to New Haven to cross the Hudson and take it to Boston. Rather than trying to write all of those reporting marks for the car routing instructions, agents could just write “Alphabet Route.”
Model Information: These ready-to-run cars feature: die cast slope sheet-hopper bay-center sill assembly; injection molded plastic sides, ends, and hopper doors; fully molded brake tank, valve and air lines; body mounted brake hose detail; coal load; lever-style hand brake; body mounted magnetically operating knuckle couplers; close coupling; and Fox Valley Models metal wheels.
Prototype History:
The USRA 55-Ton hopper was designed by the United States Railway Administration during World War I as a standardized hopper to be used by all railroads in order to aid the war effort. After WWI many railroads continued to use the USRA 55-Ton hoppers, as well as build many thousands more clones. The USRA hopper was in use on North American railroads from 1918 until the 1970’s
Road Name History:
The Pittsburgh and West Virginia Railway (reporting mark PWV) was a railroad in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Wheeling, West Virginia areas. Originally built as the Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railway, a Pittsburgh extension of George J. Gould's Wabash Railroad, the venture entered receivership in 1908 and the line was cut loose. An extension completed in 1931 connected it to the Western Maryland Railway at Connellsville, Pennsylvania, forming the Alphabet Route, an independent line between the Northeastern U.S. and the Midwest. It was leased by the Norfolk and Western Railway in 1964 in conjunction with the N&W acquiring several other sections of the former Alphabet Route, but was leased to the new spinoff Wheeling and Lake Erie Railway in 1990, just months before the N&W was merged into the Norfolk Southern Railway.

The original Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railway built several massive engineering works, including the Wabash Terminal in downtown Pittsburgh, destroyed by fire in 1946. The Wabash Bridge over the Monongahela River into Pittsburgh was torn down in 1948, and on December 27, 2004 the Wabash Tunnel just southwest of the bridge opened as a high occupancy vehicle roadway through Mount Washington. As of December 2008 the two piers of the long gone Wabash Bridge remain standing.

At the end of 1960 P&WV operated 132 mi (212 km) of road on 223 mi (359 km) of track; that year it reported 439 million net ton-miles of revenue freight.
Brand/Importer Information:
Bluford Shops began in 2007 as a side project of two model railroad industry veterans, Craig Ross and Steve Rodgers. They saw a gap between road names available on N scale locomotives but not available on cabooses. They commissioned special runs of Atlas cabooses in Atlantic Coast Line, Central of Georgia, Monon, Boston & Maine and Southern plus runs on Grand Trunk Western and Central Vermont on the MDC wooden cabooses. While these were in process, they began to develop their first all new tooling project, 86' Auto Parts Boxcars in double door and quad door editions in N scale. By January of 2008, Bluford Shops became a full time venture. Along with additional N scale freight cars and their own tooling for new cabooses, they have brought their own caboose line to HO scale. They also have their popular Cornfields in both HO and N. The future looks bright as they continue to develop new products for your railroad.

The town of Bluford in southern Illinois featured a small yard on Illinois Central's Edgewood Cutoff (currently part of CN.) The yard included a roundhouse, concrete coaling tower (which still stands) and large ice house. Reefer trains running between the Gulf Coast and Chicago were re-iced in Bluford. Things are more quiet now in Bluford with the remaining tracks in the yard used to stage hoppers for mines to the south and store covered hoppers. Intersecting the IC line in Bluford is Southern Railway's (currently NS) line between Louisville and St. Louis. Traffic on this single track line remains relatively heavy.
Item created by: Jenna on 2016-06-24 16:23:27. Last edited by gdm on 2018-01-24 07:35:53

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