NEW YORK CENTRAL PASSENGER CAR ROSTER

This is a combination New York Central passenger car roster summary and list of available HO scale models that are reasonably close to New York Central passenger car prototypes. Please note that I have not tried to detail all possible rebuildings or renumberings as they can sometimes get very complicated and would require an extensive amount of time to detail ( and would make this page too big for most people to handle). Many heavyweight cars ended up in MofW service. I do not have a large amount of information of the early steel underframe cars, so most of the roster details with the modern all steel cars and steel underframe cars that remained in service longer than most.

A large number of the cars listed have been produced in brass at one time or another by Soho, Precision Scale, Metro Models, Great Brass Fleet or Shoreham / Railway Classics. Most of these cars are fairly accurate, though some cars are only accurate for a specific time period ( Such as the SOHO lightweight baggage car - it's only accurate for the mid 1960's rebuilds with the fibreglass doors and the end skirting removed ). Also BEWARE of models by Balboa, Lambert and Westside - nearly all of the cars from these companies DO NOT match any NYC prototype cars whatsoever - despite claims on the box or NYC painted models ( One exception to this is the Lambert 2 car set for the C&O kitchen/dining car set - these are reasonably accurate for the cars NYC purchased from the cancelled C&O order ).

One unusual model that is nearly accurate is a 1960's bakelite model of a NYC heavyweight baggage car produced by Tenshodo. Only ONE side of the car is accurate - NYC baggage cars usually have the double door to the left when viewing the side of the car. The Tenshodo model has the double doors towards the same end of the car, so viewing one side of the car - the double doors are to the right. If you find 2 cars - you could change the sides to make one good car ! Of course, these are fairly crude models by todays standards. Walthers produced a wide variety of passenger car models up to the early 1980's. Many of the cars offered for NYC are fairly accurate, though again, somewhat crude by todays standards, but can be built into nice models.

"STAND-IN" basically means the car 'could' be used to model a particular series, but there are significant body detail differences that make it a poor choice, but of course this is up to the individual. Nearly all of the available plastic models have some minor detail differences between the model and prototype. Models listed WITHOUT notes should be considered CLOSE to NYC prototype, however, one particular area that may not match is the underbody details. Many of the new Walthers passenger cars have bodies that match the NYC, but have different underbody/air conditioning details. For most people, this is not an issue so long as the body is reasonably correct. For others, it may not be acceptable. Since these details can vary from car to car after delivery and years in service and modifications made to cars in service, I have not tried to detail these differences.

This is a work in progress and as new information comes to light, this page is subject to changes, corrections and additions as I have time to do so. Note: I would like to believe the information contained here is 100% correct, but this is simply impossible. Unfortunately, there have been errors found in the original documents used, as well as transposition and typographical errors in the processing of some documents. NYC and Pullman documents have been used to compile this listing, but these do contain errors themselves. Also, I have not made any attempt to locate NYC cars that still exist - either in some form of Railroad service, privately owned or located in Museums. Some cars marked retired or scrapped may still exist as railroad documents do not usually show what happens after the car has been removed from the Railroad property. Cars may be sold to an equipment dealer and then resold at a later time, but these do not show up in Company records.

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