The lightweight, streamlined passenger car was a product of the Great Depression. While the heavyweight steel cars built in the teens and 1920s were dependable and often luxurious, their dark colors and solid, battleship-like exteriors did little to lift the spirits at a time when the entire nation needed a pick-me-up. As noted railroad historian John H. White, Jr. put it in The American Railroad Passenger Car, “Some hope during these gloomy years was offered by a new design concept called streamlining. It presented a sleek, modern image of speed and innovation. What had been an obscure technical term in aerodynamics was made into a household word through an astute publicity campaign mounted by several railroad traffic departments. It succeeded in creating a general interest in railroading practically unknown since the opening of the first transcontinental line… According to Railway Age, ‘For the first time in many years, the words ‘sold out’ re-entered the ticket clerk’s vocabulary.’”
But as White notes, the real change in passenger car construction was in weight, not the streamlined appearance that was largely for show: “Weight, not air friction, was the chief obstacle to economic operation.” Unlike the heavyweights, the lightweight cars that debuted in the mid- 1930s featured sides and roofs that contributed to their structural strength, eliminating the need for the heavyweights’ massive underframes. Trucks went from six wheels to four, non-revenue space was decreased by using a vestibule on only one end of the car, and lighter, stronger, more rust resistant steel alloys came into widespread use. A typical new lightweight could be 15-20 tons lighter than the heavyweight car it replaced.
The majority of lightweights were 80’–85’ long, which scales out to about 21” in O gauge. Many O gauge modelers, however, find cars of this length impractical, as they require large curves and create long trains that can overwhelm a typical-sized layout. For those reasons, our Premier lightweights are about 70 scale feet in length — reproducing the look and feel of prototype streamliners in a model that will round O-42 curves with ease and look at home on most scale-detailed O gauge layouts.
