The Otto Perry collection at DPL inculdes several photos of CB&Q motor
cars, among them Call Number OP-4822, which is identified as EMC motor car
9505, photographed: Lincoln, Nebr., September 29, 1935.
The number has to be wrong. Doodlebug 9505 is listed in both Holck
(Burlington Rte Color Pictorial, v.1) and Corbin & Hardy (Burlington in
Transition) as a small Buda-Edwards gas-mechanical car. The car in Perry's
photo is obviously pretty large and of later design.
OP-4822 shows a passenger-baggage car with 11 or 12 windows on its right
side -- depending on whether you count the one that's whited out where the
heater is (I've never been clear how you should count windows). There are
not too many cars it could be. Holck's inventory (p. 45) lists only one
(9509) with 11 windows; but BIT has a photo and folio diagram of that car
(see p. 126; it's a fairly unusual Brill car), and it's obviously not the
same one.
Holck's list also includes a 12-window P-B car, 9567, but that one is
shown as wrecked in 1933, two years before Perry's photo. However, there
are several cars on Holck's list for which the number of windows is
omitted. The two best candidates would seem to be 9565 and 9566, both
sisters of 9567, built by St. Louis Car-EMC in 1927, and all of which have
roughly the same passenger capacity. It would be pretty easy for someone
cataloguing the photo to mis-read "9565" as "9505."
Can anybody give me a confirmation on this or identify the Perry photo for
certain? There are practical applications at stake. Its window arrangement
and placement of the baggage door are much closer to that of the Spectrum
doodlbug than on 9099, the number Bachmann assigned the car. Obviously
there are still many MANY things on the Spectrum model that would be wrong
for that or any CB&Q car; but it would appear to be a better end point for
a bash.
There was a good discussion of how to bash the Spectrum car on this list a
few years ago, and I had wanted to recheck that before sending this
message, but the message archives have been "temporarily unavailable" the
past couple days whenever I've checked.
Finally, I note that the newer, Walthers gas-electric (whose assigned CB&Q
number I don't know) looks like a plausible starting point for conversion
to the double-ended Brill car, 9509 (also with lots of dust and plastic
shavings left over). Would anybody care to tackle the question of the best
conversion potential for these two models (Spectrum versus Walthers)?
Jonathan
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