Model Railroading > Sterling Salt ACF Center-Flow

Does this particular car have a prototype, or did Accurail use their "modeler's license" as they have with other roadnames on this model?

L.G.

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Found International Salt Company on google. As far as Sterling Salt , well all I found were salt & pepper shakers.

jd

I believe Sterling Salt was a bona fide company -- I think International may have merged with or bought it, or maybe it was an International Salt brand all along. Can't say for sure whether the car is accurate, but I can tell you that Athearn lettered one of their four-bay Center-Flos for Sterling Salt, too. The Athearn car certainly was NOT accurate, as the four-bay is a plastic-pellets car, but it makes me think this three-bay car is appropriate.

The car number leads to photos on Elwood that are the same/similar sort of hopper. ACF lease fleet. None painted for Sterling, but that is probably a matter of the more recent dates of the photos. Sterling could have been back when the car was new.

Sterling Salt did have Centerflows... but IIRC they were 4650's (Atlas, IM models), along with the shorter 3560s. A lot of Accurail schemes are bogus.

RonSD70 Wrote:
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> Sterling Salt did have Centerflows... but IIRC
> they were 4650's (Atlas, IM models), along with
> the shorter 3560s. A lot of Accurail schemes are
> bogus.

I'm sure the average modeler wouldn't know the difference between the Accurail 4600
and the Atlas/IM 4650 ;^) I can't even tell without looking at a reference book
to see how much cu ft each one has. (I can tell on the 3560's though, those are
ALOT shorter :) And speaking of those 3500+ ones, how accurate of a car would
you have if you took an Athearn 4-bay and cut out one of the bays? Would it be
"close enough"? I'd like to do a couple.

The scheme did exist and is correct, even if the car it is on MAY not be. I have seen photos of ACF-type cars wearing this scheme within the Genesee & Wyoming salt mine yards in central New York.

'Spatcher out...

Sterling Salt definitely had covered hoppers, I remember seeing them on Long Island in the '70s and '80s as road salt was shipped in. McKean made the 4650s as Intermountain does now. Herald King used to produce decals for the 4650 (which, like many of their decals, was prototypically accurate at a time when there was no correpsonding model). If you put a 4600 and a 4650 next to each other you can see the difference. The 4600 is a plate B car that is a few feet longer than the shorter "pudgier" plate C 4650. Gosh, Accurail not producing an accurate paint scheme? Next we'll see complaints about Penn Central decals on steam engines.

Thanks for the replies.

I can live with inaccurate cars/paint schemes. I was just curious about this one as I couldn't locate photos of the real thing.

Anyone have pics of the prototype cars?

L.G.

I found an O scale Sterling Salt hopper on ebay..mfg by Atlas and in a different paint scheme. Didnt look to have the "international Salt company" script on the side..
Roger Bekett

Cutting a bay out of an Athearn four-bay Center-flow is unlikely to create an accurate model -- the hopper trough doors would still be for the plastics car. I can't say I have ever seen a three-bay plastics car. The commercially produced three-bay grain hoppers would be a much better starting point for a salt car -- in fact, salt service is where many older grain hoppers "go to die" because salt is hell on maintenance.