Robert's World in Smaller Gauges: Consistency

When I was a child growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, we frequently had to cross the tracks of a regional short line, the Florida East Coast Railroad. We might be stopped at the Greenland Road grade crossing, the St. Augustine Road grade crossing, but usually it was the University Blvd crossing where we'd be held up. The crossing was removed in 1983 and replaced by an overpass. This is just north of the vast Bowden Yard, where the trains were switched and made up.

As the trains would go buy, being hauled by Geeps, or if we were lucky, the old BL2 or SW's, the one thing I always noticed was the consistency in the size of the cars. In the mid-1970's, you could still find 40' boxcars, though 50' and high-cubes were also very common. Except for the latter, they were all the roughly the same height. Also at that time, there were plenty of two-bay hoppers still being used in the limestone and sand trade, and for the most part it was the same - they were fairly consistent.

This is probably a nit-pick with me on my little railroad. Because I am sticking with O27 track, I need to use smaller cars. My line won't be true O scale for that reason. The deciding factor was actually my first boxcar, the Kusan M&St.L 40 footer that I acquired with my first lot. Even though it isn't highly detailed, it does look the part.

However, it isn't O scale. It's 90%, in fact, making it like 1/53.3 scale.

Since the die was cast with that purchase, it became necessary to find more rolling stock that would be consistent with that size. This is where the problems were bound to arise.

Kusan is long gone, but its ghost can still be found.

I've read that Lionel's 6464 boxcar series are fairly ubiquitous, and their descendants rather affordable. The question was, how large are they? I searched all over the Internet, and discovered that too often people were measuring the cars in random ways and not body length. It was important for me to take a leap and just buy a Lionel boxcar. I found an inexpensive 9400 series boxcar from 1979 for the Napierville Junction Railroad.

At the same time, I decided it would probably behoove me to look for other sources, and the one that seemed to be logical was K-Line. While as a separate entity they no longer exist, they did have a good run and produced some nice rolling stock. I found a "Los Angeles" boxcar that looked similar enough to the old Kusan one that I assumed it may have been from the same dies, albeit improved.

In the meantime, I found another Kusan boxcar, which is missing a set of wheels. This would give me a total of four boxcars.

When they arrived, I was rather pleased to discover that they were all the same size as my first Kusan car. In fact, they all arrived on the exact same day.