RailSmith - 501870 - Passenger Car, Lightweight, Pullman, Chair Car - Santa Fe - 2-Pack

Specific Item Information: Between 1946 and 1953, the Santa Fe Railway ordered 137 Chair Cars. These cars were added to trains like the Texas Chief, San Francisco Chief and the El Capitan allowing older cars to be retired from those trains. The Budd company supplied 45 of those cars, with the remaining 92 were built by Pullman.

Our two Santa Fe Chair Cars in this release are from those delivered from Pullman-Standard. Although none of the actual cars are 100% like our fluted Pullman Coach, we feel that the lack of Chair cars for this great railroad is sufficient reason to produce what we will call Classic versions for your enjoyment.

Car #3179 is a ‘Chair Club’ car and sports an antenna on the roof. While road#3180 has no antenna. These cars are all sliver, roof, trucks and under frame.

Road Name History: The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (reporting mark ATSF), often abbreviated as Santa Fe or AT&SF, was one of the larger railroads in the United States. Chartered in February 1859, the railroad reached the Kansas-Colorado border in 1873 and Pueblo, Colorado, in 1876. To create a demand for its services, the railroad set up real estate offices and sold farm land from the land grants that it was awarded by Congress. Despite the name, its main line never served Santa Fe, New Mexico, as the terrain was too difficult; the town ultimately was reached by a branch line from Lamy.

The Santa Fe was a pioneer in intermodal freight transport, an enterprise that (at one time or another) included a tugboat fleet and an airline (the short-lived Santa Fe Skyway). Its bus line extended passenger transportation to areas not accessible by rail, and ferryboats on the San Francisco Bay allowed travelers to complete their westward journeys to the Pacific Ocean. The ATSF was the subject of a popular song, Harry Warren & Johnny Mercer's "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe", written for the film, The Harvey Girls (1946).

The railroad officially ceased operations on December 31, 1996, when it merged with the Burlington Northern Railroad to form the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway.

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.