Con-Cor - 4341L - Passenger Car, Lightweight, Budd, Slumbercoach - Erie Lackawanna

Model Information: Model introduced in the early 1970's by Röwa for Con-Cor. After Röwa went bankrupt circa 1974, Con-Cor failed to acquired the molds, and redeveloped them with Rivarossi.

Prototype History: The Slumbercoach is an 85-foot-long, 24 single room, eight double room streamlined sleeping car. Built in 1956 by the Budd Company for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad for service on the Denver Zephyr, subsequent orders were placed in 1958 and 1959 by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Missouri Pacific Railroad for the Texas Eagle/National Limited, then in 1959 by the Northern Pacific Railway for its North Coast Limited and also the New York Central Railroad for use on the 20th Century Limited.

The Slumbercoach, in economic terms, was part of the American railways’ attempt, in the 1950s, to recapture market share lost to airlines, buses and the automobile by providing upgraded accommodations for non-first class passengers. Demand for private accommodation (bedrooms and roomettes) remained high, while demand for the traditional Pullman open section was declining. Other types of economy sleeping car did not have the capacity of the Slumbercoach: sixteen duplex roomette-four double bedroom car slept only 24, while the traditional sixteen section tourist Pullman slept 32. Thus, the Slumbercoach, sleeping 40, allowed railways to offer coach passengers private sleeping car accommodation at little more than coach fare. In its first year of using Slumbercoaches on the North Coast Limited, the Northern Pacific Railway averaged a 27 (out of 32 available) room occupancy rate, and a 34 (out of 40 at full capacity) passenger occupancy rate." From Wikipedia

Road Name History: The Erie Lackawanna Railway (reporting mark EL), known as the Erie Lackawanna Railroad until 1968, was formed from the 1960 merger of the Erie Railroad and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. The official motto of the line was "The Friendly Service Route".

Like many railroads in the northeast already financially vulnerable from the expanding U.S. Interstate Highway System, the line was severely weakened fiscally by the extent, duration and record flood levels due to Hurricane Agnes in 1972. It would never recover, and most of the corporation's holdings were subsumed into the federal rescue purchases creating Conrail in 1976, ending its days as an operating railroad company.

Read more on Wikipedia.

Brand/Importer Information: Con-Cor has been in business since 1962. Many things have changed over time as originally they were a complete manufacturing operation in the USA and at one time had upwards of 45 employees. They not only designed the models,but they also built their own molds, did injection molding, painting, printing and packaging on their models.

Currently, most of their manufacturing has been moved overseas and now they import 90% of their products as totally finished goods, or in finished components. They only do some incidental manufacturing today within the USA.

Important Note: The Con-Cor product numbering can be very confusing. Please see here in the article how to properly enter Con-Cor stock numbers in the TroveStar database.

Manufacturer Information: Röwa was founded in 1961 by Willy Ade and Horst Röchling, the company name being an acronym of their combined names. For several years, much of Röwa’s energies were directed toward developing products for other model train manufacturers, notably Trix of Germany and, on occasion, Roco of Austria.

Production of model trains under the Röwa name began in the late 1960’s, ca. 1968. Much of the company’s products were in H0-Scale, but there was some interesting production in N-Scale.

The Röwa American-prototype N-Scale items were marketed in the United States by Model Rectifier Corporation (MRC) for a period of a few years. Both the locomotives and passenger cars were subsequently marketed by other companies in successive years. For example, Brawa and Con-Cor marketed the N&W Y-6b Mallet-type, and the Berkshire may have also been marketed in the same way. Con-Cor owned the passenger car tooling for a period of time, producing until the die-molds went out of production tolerances.

Röwa ended production around 1974 and the manufacturing tools and dies used to produce the trains were sold to other companies.

From this website.