North American Railcar - 11-11003001-04 - Gondola, Coal, 4000 cf - Canadian National - 900176

Model Information: PWRS introduced this body style in 2008.

Prototype History: The 4000 cu ft. gondola was the preferred car style of CN for transporting coal from five Alberta mines to either the west coast ports for export or to ports on Lake Superior (Thunder Bay, Marmion Lake) for use by Ontario Hydro.

The first cars were built in 1970 for CN as CN 199000 series and the first eight in the series were built as double rotary cars with a rotating drawbar on each end. The cars had a capacity of 263,000 lbs and a light weight of about 58,000 lbs, giving them a load limit of approximately 205,000 lbs. Thus the cars could carry a cargo of 100 tons with a little room for overloads. When the maximum capacity was increased to 286, 000 lbs, all of the coal cars had the load limit increased by 23, 000 lbs. (The SULX cars kept their original load limit).

The cars also had a load-empty feature that increased the braking capacity of the cars when loaded, similar to a retainer. The purpose was to reduce the brake pressure when the cars were empty in order to reduce the number of skidded wheels while providing sufficient braking capacity when loaded.

From PWRS

Road Name History: The Canadian National Railway Company (reporting mark CN) is a Canadian Class I railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec that serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States. CN's slogan is "North America's Railroad". CN is a public company with 24,000 employees. It had a market capitalization of 32 billion CAD in 2011. CN was government-owned, having been a Canadian Crown corporation from its founding to its privatization in 1995. Bill Gates was, in 2011, the largest single shareholder of CN stock.

CN is the largest railway in Canada, in terms of both revenue and the physical size of its rail network, and is currently Canada's only transcontinental railway company, spanning Canada from the Atlantic coast in Nova Scotia to the Pacific coast in British Columbia. Its range once reached across the island of Newfoundland until 1988, when the Newfoundland Railway was abandoned.

Following CN's purchase of Illinois Central (IC) and a number of smaller US railways, it also has extensive trackage in the central United States along the Mississippi River valley from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Today, CN owns about 20,400 route miles (32,831 km) of track in 8 provinces (the only two not served by CN are Newfoundland & Labrador and Prince Edward Island), as well as a 70-mile (113 km) stretch of track (see Mackenzie Northern Railway) into the Northwest Territories to Hay River on the southern shore of Great Slave Lake; it is the northernmost rail line anywhere within the North American Rail Network, as far north as Anchorage, Alaska (although the Alaska Railroad goes further north than this, it is isolated from the rest of the rail network).

The railway was referred to as the Canadian National Railways (CNR) between 1918 and 1960, and as Canadian National/Canadien National (CN) from 1960 to the present.

Read more on Wikipedia.

Brand/Importer Information: North American Railcar is a manufacturer of N Scale model rolling stock. NAR is a subsidiary of Pacific Western Rail Systems, a hobby shop based in Surrey, British Columbia, founded by owner Dan Huberman. PWRS has been working with Micro-Trains for decades producing special runs of MTL cars for sale exclusively through their store. In 2008, PWRS started production of their own body styles - which are also exclusively sold through the PWRS storefront under the brand name North American Railcar. As of 2016 they produce three body styles each with several variations to achieve prototypical accuracy. In 2017 they announced production of a fourth body style.