Lionel 6-81858 PRR GLa Hopper Paint Scheme

A GLa with this shadow keystone paint scheme on an oxide red car is shown on page 27 in John Teichmoeller's book Pennsylvania Railroad Steel Open Hopper Cars.  Of course the red background inside the keystone as shown in the Lionel catalog is incorrect.  The catalog illustrations of the ball keystone cars also show a red background for the keystone.  I asked Lionel about this and got the following reply.

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Bob,

The finished cars will not have red backgrounds in the keystones or ball heralds. Both will be the car color which will be PRR freight car color. I think PRR fans will be VERY pleased with these cars. Both should fill a big gap in the current O gauge offerings. A significant amount of research has gone into these and we have used PRR drawings for the model. And we will also be tooling multiple details to make this hopper more appropriate for a variety of other roads who purchased copies of the GLa as well as the similar “1905 Common Design” and later USRA cars. We will be adding some era and road specific details to the N5b as well. The new tooling for these cars will include correct PRR sideframes for each as well. (I noted there were some concerns on the OGR forum that these might show up with roller bearings!)

These will likely be two of the finest freight cars Lionel has ever produced. Without going into details on roadnames and numbers, it is safe to assume that there will be additional runs of these cars in the future. As we get closer to production and more details can be shown, look for updates on our Wordpress blog, at trade shows, etc.

If any more questions come up, feel free to drop me a line.

Ryan Kunkle

Project Manager, High End Locomotives (and sometimes freight cars J )

LIONEL L.L.C

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Thanks Bob,

I also looked at Teichmoeller's book plus PRRT&HS Keystones and some internet sources but could not find any any such paint scheme.  I figured that the illustrator intended to do a Shadow Keystone and used whatever logo was handy.

I was surprised to find so many variations of the basic Ball Keystone. 

Jan