Con-Cor - 4321B - Passenger Car, Pullman, Semi-Corrugated, Dome - Chesapeake & Ohio

Model Information: These cars were originally manufactured for MRC by Röwa (Germany) in the end 1960s-early 1970s. Röwa also sold them under its own brand. Post-MRC, Con-Cor distributed them for a while under its brand name and attempted to acquire the tooling in order to set up production of these cars at Rivarossi. However, said tooling was eventually lost (or confiscated) and these models subsequently vanished from the face of the earth. They have metal window frames, close-coupling, diaphragms and venetian blinds in the windows. Some come equipped with interior lighting.
This model was made after the Pullman Dome, but not matching a particular prototype. The lower corrugated part was similar to the ATSF Pleasure domes, but the dome itself is similar to the B&O Colombian dome; the sides' windows arrangement could have been inspired from Wabash and Texas & Pacific domes.
See here for more details.

Prototype History: The Vista-Dome is a deluxe coach with a glass compartment rising out of the roof. This railroad passenger car has a second floor with 24 or 30 seats, lots of windows and no obstructions. The front and rear walls of the dome are windows. The entire side of the dome is made of windows. Curved glass is used to transition from the side to the roofing on vista-domes. All of this glass allows passengers to view the all the great and vast scenery. At night only the only lights used are to illuminate the floor allowing passengers to look up and watch for falling stars. A Vista-Dome has only one set of stairs up and down. It is not the place to hide from a ticket collecting conductor.

The Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad, the Burlington Railroad, introduced the Vista-Dome passenger car into regular service in 1947 on it's Twin Zephyr train. It was part of the standard equipment of the California Zephyr train when that train started running on March 20, 1949. The Twin Cities Zephyr train included 5 Vista-Dome cars. Standard height dome cars, 24 inches over the roofline were not suitable for service on most eastern railroads because of clearance problems. Budd built domes with a 19 1/2 inch dome top for eastern service. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was the only pre-Amtrak east coast railroad that had Vista-Domes in revenue service. The domes were a part of the Columbian and Capitol trains.

More photos on this website.

Road Name History: The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (reporting marks C&O, CO) was a Class I railroad formed in 1869 in Virginia from several smaller Virginia railroads begun in the 19th century. Led by industrialist Collis P. Huntington, it reached from Virginia's capital city of Richmond to the Ohio River by 1873, where the railroad town (and later city) of Huntington, West Virginia was named for him.

Tapping the coal reserves of West Virginia, the C&O's Peninsula Extension to new coal piers on the harbor of Hampton Roads resulted in the creation of the new City of Newport News. Coal revenues also led the forging of a rail link to the Midwest, eventually reaching Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo in Ohio and Chicago, Illinois.

By the early 1960s the C&O was headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. In 1972, under the leadership of Cyrus Eaton, it became part of the Chessie System, along with the Baltimore and Ohio and Western Maryland Railway. The Chessie System was later combined with the Seaboard Coast Line and Louisville and Nashville, both the primary components of the Family Lines System, to become a key portion of CSX Transportation (CSXT) in the 1980s. A substantial portion of Conrail was added in 1999.

C&O's passenger services ended in 1971 with the formation of Amtrak. Today Amtrak's tri-weekly Cardinal passenger train follows the historic and scenic route of the C&O through the New River Gorge in one of the more rugged sections of the Mountain State. The rails of the former C&O also continue to transport intermodal and freight traffic, as well as West Virginia bituminous coal east to Hampton Roads and west to the Great Lakes as part of CSXT, a Fortune 500 company which was one of seven Class I railroads operating in North America at the beginning of the 21st century.

At the end of 1970 C&O operated 5067 miles of road on 10219 miles of track, not including WM or B&O and its subsidiaries.

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.