RailSmith - 749901 - Passenger Car, Smoothside, Pullman, Dining - Northern Pacific - 453

Specific Item Information: This dining car was built by Pullman in 1947 for service on the new ‘Streamlined North Coast Limited’. Build as a Lunch Counter-Diner’, it was later converted to this full diner version.

There were six cars in this series, #450-455. Three of those cars were converted over time, and we have chosen this particular road number as it was one of those three cars.

In 1953 it was converted to a full diner, and its skirts were removed as our model is.

In 1958, it was assigned to the Mainstreeter.

In 1962 a lounge section was added, then called ‘Economy Buffet’, and in 1967 it was assigned to the 407-408 Portland to Seattle Pool Trains. Diner Road #453 is one of two cars that followed all of this exact path of use.

Road Name History: The Northern Pacific Railway (reporting mark NP) was a transcontinental railroad that operated across the northern tier of the western United States from Minnesota to the Pacific Coast. It was approved by Congress in 1864 and given nearly 40 million acres (160,000 km2) of land grants, which it used to raise money in Europe for construction. Construction began in 1870 and the main line opened all the way from the Great Lakes to the Pacific when former president Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final "golden spike" in western Montana on Sept. 8, 1883.

The railroad had about 6800 miles of track and served a large area, including extensive trackage in the states of Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. In addition the company had an international branch to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The main activities were shipping wheat and other farm products, cattle, timber and minerals; bringing in consumer goods, transporting passengers; and selling land.

The company was headquartered first in Brainerd, Minnesota, then in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It had a tumultuous financial history, and in 1970 it merged with other lines to form the Burlington Northern Railroad.

Read more on Wikipedia.

Brand/Importer Information: RailSmith is a brand launched by Lowell Smith in 2019. Lowell acquired the toolings from Walthers.

With each release, RailSmith will bring passenger cars from across the spectrum of North America’s railroads, with the goal of building entire trains over a period-of-time. It is our plan to release cars that might be for a specific train, but you can use these cars as you see fit, as did the railroads.

Production plans are grand, but we believe they are also achievable. We do not have the capabilities to release an entire train at once, but being able to focus on one release (two-or-three cars at a time), we can build a train over time.