RailSmith - 753601 - Passenger Car, Lightweight, Fluted, RPO - Texas Special - Anson B. Jones - 1000

Specific Item Information: This RPO was built by Pullman in 1947 and was part of three consists of The Texas Special. The Texas Special ran from St. Louis to San Antonio and had connecting cars to New York City and Washington DC. This Anson B. Jones, was the MKT’s contribution, with the Frisco providing the RPO ‘Rock Hill’. Both RPO cars were identical. Early on, the railroads realized that they could not turn the inbound consist to accommodate an (always) on time departure. Thus they built a third consist of heavy-weight cars, painted them red and silver ‘shadow-lined’ to match the streamline cars. Then they mixed them in with the streamline cars so that no customer would be disappointed and say ‘oh we got the old train today’!

Brand/Importer Information: RailSmith is a brand launched by Lowell Smith in 2019. Lowell acquired the toolings from Walthers.

With each release, RailSmith will bring passenger cars from across the spectrum of North America’s railroads, with the goal of building entire trains over a period-of-time. It is our plan to release cars that might be for a specific train, but you can use these cars as you see fit, as did the railroads.

Production plans are grand, but we believe they are also achievable. We do not have the capabilities to release an entire train at once, but being able to focus on one release (two-or-three cars at a time), we can build a train over time.