RailSmith - 41106-8 - Passenger Car, Lightweight, Pullman, Sleeper, Duplex - Northern Pacific - 3-Pack

Specific Item Information: Three Sleepers – 1947 North Coast Limited Sleepers: Missoula, Helena & Walla Walla – Streamliner (Pine Tree) Scheme Built in 1947 by Pullman-Standard, these cars were part of an eighteen car order, and the first cars for the streamlined North Coast Limited. These are Pullman-Standard floor plan 4119. Designated 8-6-3-1, as eight duplex roomettes, six roomettes, three double bedrooms and one compartment. All of these cars were named for towns along the NP route. When delivered, they were painted in what the NP called the ‘Streamliner’ scheme. More recently modelers and rail fans have called it the ‘Pine Tree’ scheme. They were also delivered with skirts, which our models accurately have. This is a Prototype car and to the era of this paint scheme, has skirts. See a nice photo in this gallery of this sleeper in front of the station.

Model Information: RailSmith released sets of mixed body styles in the Pullman lightweight series starting in 2019.

Road Name History: The Northern Pacific Railway (reporting mark NP) was a transcontinental railroad that operated across the northern tier of the western United States from Minnesota to the Pacific Coast. It was approved by Congress in 1864 and given nearly 40 million acres (160,000 km2) of land grants, which it used to raise money in Europe for construction. Construction began in 1870 and the main line opened all the way from the Great Lakes to the Pacific when former president Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final "golden spike" in western Montana on Sept. 8, 1883.

The railroad had about 6800 miles of track and served a large area, including extensive trackage in the states of Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. In addition the company had an international branch to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The main activities were shipping wheat and other farm products, cattle, timber and minerals; bringing in consumer goods, transporting passengers; and selling land.

The company was headquartered first in Brainerd, Minnesota, then in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It had a tumultuous financial history, and in 1970 it merged with other lines to form the Burlington Northern Railroad.

Read more on Wikipedia.

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.