Nostalgia & History > A Little Freight Car Break

Cement covered hoppers this time.

Here is BKTY 1357 in Katy Red at Okla City in April 1984.

Yardclerk

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MKT 433 in John Deere Green. Very reminiscent of a RAMAX HO 2-bay covered hopper from the 1980s.

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CNW 95760 in their short-lived Zita yellow paint scheme.

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Lastly, a Rock Island Baggage-RPO car at El Reno Yard in Winter 1984. As it is no longer a passenger car, it is a freight car, I guess.

Eventually, it will be set on the ground as a yard office building at a tile company in Okla City. They painted it Pink and Black. Must have been Elvis fans!

Yardclerk

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yardclerk Wrote:
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> MKT 433 in John Deere Green. Very reminiscent of a
> RAMAX HO 2-bay covered hopper from the 1980s.

It's even more reminiscent of the Front Range/McKean kit :)
(The Ramax kit is an earlier prototype with the rib running down
the side of the body about 1/3 of the way down from the top).
I saw a bunch of those cars with different reporting marks (can't
recall off hand now what they were) in Cordele GA just before Christmas.
You can duplicate that car now with the Intermountain kit...oh well, I
guess this isn't the model railroading forum ;^)

By the way, what was the deal with BKTY reporting marks? I have seen this before on other Katy cars (only on the 2-bay cement covered hoppers). What does the "B" stand for?

Barriger

I don't really know for sure. These reporting marks began to be used while John W. Barriger was "President and Traveling Freight Agent" of the Katy.

As a result, it was said that BKTY stood for Barriger Katy. I don't think this is true though.

Here is a another picture I found today. MKT 100248, an ex-DF car, that was assigned to Maintenance of Way service. It was in the "Deramus" Katy paint scheme.

Yardclerk

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Cars lettered BKTY were owned by the Bankers Leasing Corporation, which was a subsidiary of The Commonwealth Plan (a company that used to own a lot more freight cars than it does now). Bankers Leasing Corporation also had some connection with SP (its own cars, lettered BLCX, had SP lettering on them), and some of the BKTY cars actually had SP-style classifications on them.