Rolling Stock: SP&S Boxcar 12511

Another stop on our recent weekend up north was Art Knapp Mud Bay Village in Surrey, BC which includes a fantastic room stocked with everything you need for your garden train. It's an entire train store within a big garden store and it's focused just on garden trains. There is a great selection of rolling stock and track from different manufacturers including sectional track in a variety of curvatures. As the target scale of the PE&A is 1:29, I was excited to see so many Aristo-Craft boxes lining the shelves.

I only took a few snapshots in the store and they don't do the place justice. Check out the short video on their website to get a better feel for the place. Unfortunately it was raining (and snowing a bit too) the day we stopped by so the trains weren't running outside and I didn't take any pictures of the outside tracks. I'll just have to come back on a nicer day to see the layout in action.

Look at all the pretty yellow Aristo-Craft boxes!

A dizzying array of curvature options. Most of the track is from Aristo-Craft and AML, but I think
I also saw some Bachmann and LGB.

Rolling stock options included Aristo-Craft, Piko, USA Trains and American Mainline. Maybe some Bachmann too?

I couldn't leave empty-handed so I went home with an Aristo-Craft SP&S boxcar 12511. As I may have mentioned in an earlier post, the Spokane Portland & Seattle Railway is one of the four major railroads that merged to form Burlington Northern in 1971. Prior to the merger SP&S was co-owned by Great Northern and Northern Pacific. The SP&S mainline ran from Spokane to Portland and skirted the eastern edge of the Palouse region. In part due to its partial ownership by NP, SP&S boxcars would frequently be found along NP lines across the Palouse. A 40-foot boxcar like this is typical of what would have been used for hauling grain on branch lines up until the late 1970's.

SP&S boxcar 12511

I couldn't find a picture online of SP&S 12511, but here are links to a few similar boxcars in the same numbering range and with a similar paint job: SP&S 12048, SP&S 12183 and SP&S 12270. The way the S.P.&S. letters are spaced in descending steps on these cars is a very odd design choice and I'm not sure why it was done, although I do like it. The descending SP&S lettering was only used for a few years -- it's more common to see SP&S cars where the letters are aligned horizontally. For comparison, here's the picture I posted a few months ago of the SP&S boxcar at the Inland Northwest Rail Museum which is a slightly later model and lettering design.

SP&S boxcar 13430