This project is currently in progress. Drawings were started by the author based upon specifications found in a 1913 Offical Railway Equipment Register along with some grainy old photos. Friend and fellow Cornwall Railroad modeler, James Mattern took this information and started constructing styrene masters for these cars which will in turn be used to make molds of. From these molds, resin cars will be cast.
Not too much is known about these cars except that they were purchased second hand in 1905. There were two distinct types. What appear to be flat bottom gondolas and gondolas with hoppers on the botom. Both types share the same over all dimenisons with the excpetion of the height. The gondolas were only two boards high, where as the hoppers were three boards high.
It is possible that they came from the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad although that is purely hypothetical. There are drawings for a Pennsylvania, Poughkeepsie & Boston seires of cars that were built in 1889 and leased to the P&R which match the specfications for the hopper bottom cars that the Cornwall had. Could these be the same cars? Wooden cars had a much shorter lifespan than their modern day relatives and the build dates for these series of cars sound close to what would be expected.
In 1904 there were no frieght cars listed for the Cornwall Railroad. It is assumed that they must have used cars from other lines brought in by interchange in addition to cars owned by some of the local industrys (photos show that Lebanon Furnaces had some cars of their own which went to the open pit for loading with ore). In 1913, there were 47 wooden gondolas and 90 wooden hoppers. They were numbered in the 100 to 250 series. Going by photos it appears that the gondolas were the 100 series and the hoppers must have been 150 - 250 series (assuming that originally they had 50 gons and 101 hoppers). In 1917, there were 37 gons and 58 hoppers respectively. In 1921, there were only 7 and 16 of each left. By 1928 they were all retired.
These were not the only cars the Cornwall had as they owned many others over the years. These cars are of interest as they are the only ones known to have been owned in the summer of 1907 which is the time modeled. Interesetingly enough, in the fall of that year the Cornwall took delivery of 25 steel low sided gondolas numbered 75 - 99. Sticking to protoype data there are no plans to model these cars as they did not exist in the modeled time frame. Perhaps when the layout is entirely done and nothing else is left to do these steel gondolas could be made but they could only be run on the layout when no one else is looking!
