A home for orphans . . .

Paul Dolkos spent almost two decades building and detailing his beautiful Boston & Maine White Mountain Division. In addition to the layout itself, he created a roster of cars appropriate for his northern New England railroad. But, when he switched from modeling the B&M to the Baltimore Harbor District some of the New England cars seemed a little hard to justify.  . . . he also needed some Micro-Engineering track components to finish his latest addition to the new layout. The dealers were out of M-E turnouts, but I wasn't. And, while Paul found it hard to justify more than ONE Rutland car on his new layout, I can justify a couple on my layout. So, we made a swap. On Sunday I went over to Paul's to inspect progress on his railroad, and pick up the cars. I ended up with four of Paul's former freight cars - they are already performing yeoman service on the Winooski Sub. 

Paul didn't build all these cars - back in the early days of Paul's layout a mutual friend, Tom Underwood, built a number of cars for Paul. They are easy to identify by their "builders plates" that Tom added to the underside of the cars. This is the one from the Rutland flat car. In this case, this Rutland flat (detailed Athearn) was the 44th car Tom built, and he completed it in September 1993. 

Note Tom also included information on the lettering (in this case, CDS dry transfers). I think the builder's plates are kind of a neat idea, and I may incorporate them on cars I build in the future.