After building thousands of older style 40 and 50 foot boxcars at its North Fond du Lac car shops, in 1964 the Soo Line began a program to construct modern all-welded 50-foot outside-braced boxcars. These are commonly referred to as “7-post” boxcars because of the outside braces separating their eight side panels on each side of the plug door. An extensive article on these cars and their construction by Rick Johnson and Guy N. Kieckhefer appeared in the Spring 1999 of The SOO Magazine along with a large poster by Rick Johnson.
Our models are based on a unique custom-designed version of the Accurail ACF outside-braced boxcar, modified to represent the “7-post” Youngstown sides used on the Soo Line’s Fond du Lac-built cars. The Soo Line Historical and Technical Society has produced three series of these cars in past years, representing nine distinct paint and detail variations, most with two numbers. The sides of the models were designed to use Details West plug doors, which are no longer commercially available, but are used here, as they closely resemble the doors of the Soo Line prototypes.
The Soo Line cars in this run of models represent the 200 cars in the 17100-17498 (even numbers) series built in 1968. As built, the cars were painted brown as illustrated by the photo. These cars were built with diagonal-panel roofs. Our first new model represents this brown as-built version.
(The simulated unpainted galvanized roof on the model shown here was done by the modeler.)
