What are the varieties of round roofs on headend and passenger cars?

Clerestory ?  ("a clear story"; window reference)

I'm not really aware of any architectual names outside of arched, curved, or domed accompanied by references to the support, feature, and material types. 

If it helps, there are several curvatures that predominate.  PRR was close to the stremlined contour we now see, while the Harriman roads used an exaggerated arch.

@pennsynut posted:

I would like to know what design the round roof on the PRR heavyweight scenery baggage car is. 

If I could post pictures from Liljestrand & Sweetland Pennsylvania Baggage & Mail Cars it would be easy to show you the roof. 

The scenery cars, B70a, had the body of the B70 (see GGD's car) but one door was modified to a double door configuration of 10'10".  The roof looks like an extended B60b round roof (see Weaver B60b) on one end, but due to the end door arrangement the door on the A side looks like they took a saw and just sliced straight down and cut the end off.  3rd Rail did brass versions of the car and they sell for above premium.

The authors never mentioned what style the roof was.

ADDED: Staufer's books do not mention the roofs either, other than to say the Pennsy's clerestory roofs are wider than Pullman's. You may be stuck with "round roof".

And there were those lounges on some of the NYP-MIA trains which were single level, but had curved glass in the roof.  Only 6 to ten of those were made.

If you are doing a model, I think the Walthers arch roof is close to PRR.  There is a really good picture book of PRR passenger equipment - I have it somewhere.

Thanks for all the information. To recap, I have enjoyed researching the PRR scenery cars and got curious about the design name for those round roofs. When I examined the drawings on the PRR railfan site, the round roofs for those cars were the same height as the Clerestory roofs and appeared that they just extended the curve of the roof over the area for the air vents on nonairconditioned passenger cars. So, that is one type/design of round roof. I have seen references to exagerated round roofs, balloon round roofs, Harriman roofs, Pullman round roofs, Turtle round roofs and there may be more. 

I am contemplating another kitbash project and want to find an o scale arch roof. Cheers.

some of the early 'balloon roofs' were curved steel sheets placed over the existing clerestory roofs. as they aged they leaked. later during new or rebuilds the  roofs were built up from scratch.

somewhere I have authentic profiles of PRR roof outlines.

GGD sold stand alone “round” roofs to modernize their P70 model with the clerestory roof.

However, it looks like you want to modify the current roof of your project car.  I was looking at doing this to one of MTH’s PRR RPOs because one issue of this car was very close to Pennsy’s except for the Clerestory roof.  

The clerestory roof line at the end of the car is steeper than the round roof.  If you just cover the clerestory roof with modeling clay you will need to file down the ends to get the correct curvature. 

Thank you for the great info and insight. Looking forward to problem solving and working on PRR heavyweight project no. 3.

There were several different PRR round roof profiles     B60 class baggage cars were originally built with clearstory roofs.  Later in their service lives some  were rebuilt with 13' 6" round roofs. Rebuilt cars retained their B60 classification.  B60b baggage cars were a later design and built new with 14' 1/2" round roofs.  B60's had a shallow roof curvature that comes close to that of lightweight streamlined passenger cars.   Other differences between B60 and B60b baggage cars include the number of side plates and the height of the side sill above the rails.  Weaver attempted to do a B60 clearstory roof car but the side was too tall as they reused elements of their B60b tooling.  The Weaver (now Lionel)  B60b is a very nice model, and in several aspects a better model that the 1970's brass NJCB B60b import.  The NJCB B60b underbody detail was reversed (top down view vs. bottom up!)and the port hole baggage door windows were oversized.    In the 1970's Sunset (Mort Mann) imported from Japan round roof end door B70a scenery cars and B74b horse cars.  They had very nice bodies and trucks, but underbody detail was sparse.  More recently Scott Mann's Sunset 3rd Rail (or Golden Gate Depot??) imported painted brass models of the B70a and B74b cars.  To the best of my knowledge to date no one has offered a clearstory roof B74a horse car in O scale.  Throw in several AtlasO express service X29's and a P Company brass X42 and O scalers have the makings of a very diverse PRR mail and express train.  

Huh. It would have been useful if the title of the thread had reflected the actual questions the OP asked. I'll delete my comment.

Rather than repeat all the great info that has already been posted, I'll simply leave everyone with this link to show the variations of the P70.  There were many.  You can see the profile difference between the "arch" roof and the "balloon" roof. 

Ed - I haven't forgotten that I owe you photos of the Alco P70fbR you recently sold me!  I need it to be less than 110 to get a nice picture of the underbody in sunlight!  Might be down to 105 this weekend if we are lucky.  Very late for this kind of weather.

P70 Info

Thanks again to all the posters for their infomative discussions. I now have an idea of what my next project could be. 

Sorry Lew. My inquiry was about the different types of round roofs as background information in general with the intention of applying the knowledge to some projects. Cheers.

@pennsynut posted:

Thank you for the great info and insight. Looking forward to problem solving and working on PRR heavyweight project no. 3.

Pennsynut, since you are a fan of the PRR, you should know about this web site.

This site allows you to make your own PRR Keystone signs, like this one:

You can also make plain signs, like this design:

I used this site extensively to make the graphics I used in the video I produced about Bob Bartizek's amazing Pennsylvania & Western Railroad. It's in Great Layout Adventures 11.

@Rich Melvin posted:

This site allows you to make your own PRR Keystone signs....

Nice site.  Thanks for listing it