MODEL PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR UNLESS NOTED Ma & Pa baggage car No. 44 rolls into town behind a gas-electric. The HO model was scratchbuilt using plans worked up from a photo. From a photo to a model: Ma & Pa baggage car No. 44 Using Photoshop® I to help turn a photo into a set of plans/Richard E. Bradley
follow the Maryland & Pennsylva- nia Railroad for most of my model- ing. The railroad was as quaint as the rural countryside it served, wan- dering 77 miles to connect York, Penn- sylvania, and Baltimore, Maryland, which were only 45 miles apart by highway. Long a favorite of railroad photographers and modelers, parts of the route were built during the great narrow gauge railroad boom of the 1870’s and 1880’s. Conversion to stan- dard gauge came in 1895. As time changed the railroad con- tracted. In 1958 the Maryland portion closed. The mainline dwindled with a section being abandoned in 1978, then the rest in 1984. Some switching re- mained in its hometown, York. In 1984, operating as the York Railway Compa- ny, it took over the former Pennsylva- nia Railroad trackage between Han-
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
over, Pennsylvania, and York. Genesee & Wyoming took over the YRC in 2002 and continues to operate it as part of its collection of shortlines. A small piece of the original Ma & Pa remains in the hands of a historical group along with some buildings and equipment, and some of the right-of- way is now a hiking trail, but that is all
Dimensions for Ma & Pa baggage car No. 44
Inside Length: 54′-2″ Outside Length: 55′-1″ Inside Width: 9′-0½″ Outside Width: 9′-10″ Inside Height: 7′-1″ Outside Height: 13′-0½″ All eight windows are 22″×33″
that is left of the road other than mem- ories, photos and models.
I decided to add to my passenger car
roster, but the few, suitable commercial offerings only provided mail/baggage cars. What I needed was a full baggage car. After looking at prototype photos, I finally chose to build Ma & Pa baggage car No. 44. Fortunately, a picture from Bob’s Photos provided an almost square-on side view of No. 44, so the project seemed possible. However,
I
still needed plans. I was able to locate passenger car data in the historical information sec- tion of the Maryland & Pennsylvania Historical Society website (http://www.
maparailroadhist.org/passenger.htm). The information is derived from a ros- ter of Maryland & Pennsylvania equip- ment compiled by Charles T. Mahan, Jr., and includes the dimensional data
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