Union Pacific 'Pacific Fast Mail'

The basic rule of M&E consists is that there are no rules.  Whatever kind of baggage or RPO cars a railroad used might appear in an M&E trains.  BTW, all cars handling mail, express or baggage were listed in the equipment register as baggage cars.

You need to decide what your railroad used as rider cars.  The options are

- caboose with high speed trucks and passenger brakes (rare except on the PRR).

- obsolete passenger car converted on rider coach (on the NYC, middle windows were covered.)

- Any passenger car not needed for revenue service.

The minimum requirement was seats for the conductor and rear brakeman and some means of heating the car.

As for cars from other railroads, it was mostly a matter of where you had through cars.  Magazine distribution, for example, could be a million copies nation-wide from a single printing plant.  That's a lot of carloads, maybe once a month and some destinations beyond the origin railroad receiving enough copies to fill a car.  If there was enough parcel post from New York to fill cars to LA and/or SF , then there would be an NYC or PRR car on the SF, Q, CNW, MILW, UP or SP and v.v.

So just think about what high volume routes might have used your railroad and select foreign cars accordingly.

Fantastic! Thank you so much @mlaughlinnyc!! 

I "created" an Illinois Central Fast Mail consist which transported mail from Chicago to St. Louis.  The IC smooth side baggage/RPOs, IC Harriman RPO, IC mail baggage Express box cars, UP Express and Merchandise cars have been collected over a period of three or so years.  The head end cars are MTH Premier and all the box cars are Weaver.  I added the UP box cars to the IC consist as so far I been able to locate only five Weaver IC mail/baggage box cars.  But for my tastes, the added colors of the UP box cars actually makes for a more interesting train.

I decided that justification for the UP cars in the IC mail consist lay with the fact that I have put together the UP City of St. Louis (Wabash/UP combined passenger service from St. Louis to LA and San Francisco) and the UP cars could be included, probably not too realistically, in one of the passenger train runs in which Wabash diesel units pull a UP passenger car consist from St. Louis to Kansas City.

Hope this helps.

Yes. Yes it does!!! Thank you very much, sir!

I see by the train number in the indicator of the steam engine, that you are interested in UPRR Trains 5 and 6.  These were UP's mail trains to and from Los Angeles, and carried a rider coach.  I used to ride No.6 on a ticket.  Like Santa Fe Trains 7 and 8, the passengers were mostly deadheading employees, but they would accept paying riders to and from regular stops.

@Number 90 That's fantastic! Did they place the coach at the head end of the consist, near the rear, or did it vary? Thanks for the additional input, and the first-hand experience/knowledge.

Number 90 posted:

I see by the train number in the indicator of the steam engine, that you are interested in UPRR Trains 5 and 6.  These were UP's mail trains to and from Los Angeles, and carried a rider coach.  I used to ride No.6 on a ticket.  Like Santa Fe Trains 7 and 8, the passengers were mostly deadheading employees, but they would accept paying riders to and from regular stops.

Santa Fe's 7 & 8 usually carried the rider coach or combine on the rear. In my version of 7 & 8 there's a baggage car on the rear, only because it has red lights on the back and I haven't put them on the combine car yet, so the combine rides just in front of the baggage car. I'm guessing UP followed a similar practice with their mail trains.

In my experiences, I have never seen a "mail train" or "express train", that did not have the rider coach/combine attached to the rear (the exception of course would have been the PRR, that had so many mail & express trains that they finally outfitted N5 cabin cars with higher speed trucks and steam train lines for steam heat inside the car, and those cabin cars were lettered & assigned to "Assigned to Railway Express Agency).

As added information, the Southern Pacific operated an over night PFE reefer train with a three digit, low number, train number (being a second class passenger train) usually pulled by a GS class 4-8-4, with a coach in the rear. Even though the entire train was made up of all ice refrigerator cars, passenger could still purchase a ticket to ride the rear coach, in the middle of the night. 

@Lou1985 Thanks!! That's a nice looking train, sir! 

@Hot Water I appreciate the input. Am I safe to assume that even a combine would be a safe addition as the chair car, or would it have in fact been a chair car? Would that be something that would depend on the route (as in.. less potential riders needing fewer possible seats?)

TrainsOnTheBrain posted:

@Lou1985 Thanks!! That's a nice looking train, sir! 

@Hot Water I appreciate the input. Am I safe to assume that even a combine would be a safe addition as the chair car, or would it have in fact been a chair car?

Yes. Whatever was available at the time.

Would that be something that would depend on the route (as in.. less potential riders needing fewer possible seats?)

Maybe, as if LCL (Less than Car Load) or mail/baggage/company mail was a requirement, then a combine could have been necessary. However, most of the more famous, big main line "Fast Mail" trains, had a chair car, or a combine whichever was available THAT DAY. 

 

@Hot Water I really appreciate all your wonderful information on this. These are some of the cars I was originally thinking would be good candidates ... Would these be appropriate express boxcars for a UP express/fast mail consist? Or would the 'Challenger Merchandise' cars be out of place? 

Does the use, or non-use, of the Challenger cars also fall into the 'whatever was available THAT DAY' category? 

TrainsOnTheBrain posted:

@Lou1985 Thanks!! That's a nice looking train, sir! 

@Hot Water I appreciate the input. Am I safe to assume that even a combine would be a safe addition as the chair car, or would it have in fact been a chair car? Would that be something that would depend on the route (as in.. less potential riders needing fewer possible seats?)

 

Thanks. On the ATSF they had a specific class of combines that were assigned to trains 7 & 8. Most railroads didn't do that from what I gather, but I'd check UP historical sources to see what they used. 

TrainsOnTheBrain posted:

Does the use, or non-use, of the Challenger cars also fall into the 'whatever was available THAT DAY' category? 

Well, just my opinion but, I think those "Challenger" cars may just be fantasy. You might want to check with the Union Pacific Historical Society for exact details. From what I know of the UP mail trains from back in the steam days, the train make-up was mostly baggage cars, as all those were equipped with train line steam lines.

Hot Water posted:

In my experiences, I have never seen a "mail train" or "express train", that did not have the rider coach/combine attached to the rear (the exception of course would have been the PRR, that had so many mail & express trains that they finally outfitted N5 cabin cars with higher speed trucks and steam train lines for steam heat inside the car, and those cabin cars were lettered & assigned to "Assigned to Railway Express Agency).

As added information, the Southern Pacific operated an over night PFE reefer train with a three digit, low number, train number (being a second class passenger train) usually pulled by a GS class 4-8-4, with a coach in the rear. Even though the entire train was made up of all ice refrigerator cars, passenger could still purchase a ticket to ride the rear coach, in the middle of the night. 

Were the PFE reefers used on that train equipped with steam and signal lines or were they just from the regular PFE pool? I thought the orange PFE reefers weren't equipped for passenger train duty, but I could be wrong.

Lou1985 posted:

Hot Water posted:

In my experiences, I have never seen a "mail train" or "express train", that did not have the rider coach/combine attached to the rear (the exception of course would have been the PRR, that had so many mail & express trains that they finally outfitted N5 cabin cars with higher speed trucks and steam train lines for steam heat inside the car, and those cabin cars were lettered & assigned to "Assigned to Railway Express Agency).

As added information, the Southern Pacific operated an over night PFE reefer train with a three digit, low number, train number (being a second class passenger train) usually pulled by a GS class 4-8-4, with a coach in the rear. Even though the entire train was made up of all ice refrigerator cars, passenger could still purchase a ticket to ride the rear coach, in the middle of the night. 

Were the PFE reefers used on that train equipped with steam and signal lines or were they just from the regular PFE pool?

Just from the regular VERY LARGE POOL, and NOT equipped with air signal lines nor steam lines.

I thought the orange PFE reefers weren't equipped for passenger train duty, but I could be wrong.

Correct. Very few PFE ice reefers were equipped for passenger train service. The PFE was such a large organization with thousands of ice reefers, rarely was there a need to carry one or two cars on any passenger train.

@Lou1985 Thank you very much, sir! I'll keep the steam line requirement in mind. Makes sense, as you would want those IN the chair car to have amenities... I guess.   I'll have to start looking through Dad's UP books to see what I can find regarding the 'Challenger' cars and reach out to a few friends in the UPHS. Thanks for the tip!

TrainsOnTheBrain posted:

@Number 90 That's fantastic! Did they place the coach at the head end of the consist, near the rear, or did it vary

At the rear.  I didn't ride it in steam days, but, in my experience, it was always a chair car.  A rebuilt UP heavyweight was often the car, but, sometimes very late in the diesel era, it was a UP streamlined chair car, or a Milwaukee chair car from the streamliner pool.  I rode one of the Milwaukee Road cars once, on this train.  It had wood paneling inside, and the signature oval aisle windows.  But that was almost at the end of this train's service.  

A yellow Union Pacific heavyweight chair car would be authentic, at least on the portion of the trip west of Salt Lake City.

@Number 90 Thank you very much, Tom! I really appreciate you sharing  your firsthand experiences on the train. 

The Challenger express cars were real. They were all re-painted into the yellow paint scheme.

Regular PFE reefers were not used. Instead they used the 53' express reefers which PFE also had in their fleet.