The traffic tells a story
The Sudbury Division is a club, but is unusual in that it functions more like a home layout in many ways. The layout's theme, setting and era is specifically set out and all the members adhere to it. Thus, we are modelling CP Rail's Sudbury Division in the 1970s, and all of the equipment on the layout is supposed to support that theme. Even though almost all the equipment is member-owned, we are successful in doing that.
Establishing a realistic freight car fleet has been a priority since we started out, and in recent years we have been making more inroads towards getting the right proportions of home road and interchange equipment showing up in our traffic mix. The main feature of CP's Sudbury traffic is an overwhelming proportion of home road rolling stock. I'd say about 90% of the through traffic on our line was CP cars in our era. This is partly because of customs rules for trans-border traffic, and because CP and its biggest competitor, Canadian National, had virtually parallel rail systems, making most of their transcontinental traffic captive to each road--there was little need to route CN traffic onto CP and vice versa.
We still keep a large pool of US cars around to represent interchange traffic. Out of around 800 cars in service, nearly 200 are US cars. We only run around 40 to 50 of them per session, though. Our car forwarding system allows us to distinguish between cars from different regions and railroads so that we can control how many and of which type are required, and then we chose cars from those available from each pool to fill the car requests. This enables us to emphasize more appropriate or common types for specific traffic, like having Southern US cars show up in kaolin service, or New England boxcars show up in paper service from the east. It's nice to have a large pool to pick from so that we don't keep seeing the same cars on our trains; a distinctive US cars would start to stick out like a sore thumb if it ran every session, far more than a brown CP boxcar, which would blend in with the 70 or 80 others in that pool.
We have shown this video before, but it's good for illustrating our car mix:
The first train illustrates 946, a transcon Calgary to Toronto through freight. For some reason it has been drafted to lift at Sudbury, which is why it has that CP tank car first up; it will set that off at Britt, about 30 miles south of here, at the CP diesel fuel transfer there. The remainder of the first half is CP paper cars going to points south, with only a handful of non-CP cars in the rear half, including a C&O 40 foot box (probably empty going home,) an NKP covered hopper (hard to say what its business is here without reading the waybill,) an RF&P 50 footer which was probably hauling bagged kaolin also heading homeward, a Southern waffle box, likely in the same service, a D&H covered hopper, and an empty New Haven 40 footer (actually in Penn Central's service by this point, and probably heading for an appointment with a scrapyard in New Jersey next.) The rest of the tanks and hopper cars are private cars, most of which are involved in kaolin service or some other chemicals relating to paper production. Everything else is CP. That's 20 home road, 6 US cars, and 7 miscellaneous private cars plus a van (caboose.)
The second train shows 911, which is a New England to Chicago bridge train and gets proportionally more US traffic than most Sudbury Division through trains. Still mostly CP cars, its foreign traffic features an old Great Northern 40 foot box, an Algoma Central gondola returning to its home in the Soo for steel loading, a Soo Line box also heading back to home rails (CP interchanges with the Soo Line at this train's terminus in Sault Ste Marie, a hundred-odd miles west of here where this train will be taken over by the Soo as its 911 to Chicago,) and then 8 paper cars from New England and a block of 6 intermodal cars at the end of the train. Four tank cars (one ancient Shell car hauling gasoline, one chlorine car and 2 hauling LPG) round out the non-CP traffic. That's 13 CP cars, 11 foreign RR cars, 4 private tanks and the 6 intermodals.
Skipping the shot of the three RS's, the last train is 925, which is a Montreal to western Canada through freight. It's mostly CP cars again. There's a D&H covered hopper hauling talc near the front, plus one ACFX LPG tank, and then near the rear 11 forest products cars mostly owned by British Columbia Rwy or leased heading west for reloading, plus one lone D&H box hauling miscellaneous freight. That's 22 CP cars, 9 foreign cars, and 5 private cars.
It takes a certain amount of dicipline to avoid unprototypical or inappropriate cars for the most part; there will always be some personal bias which makes you want to get cars you know are wrong. We have a special pool for cars which should not be seen too often to keep the weird to a minimum. Only a couple of those cars may be run per session.
We still need to dillute our foreign and private cars more by increasing the CP cars, and we try to concentrate on adding CP cars to the fleet as much as possible. It's worth the effort to get your car mix right; it pays great dividends in making your layout look more prototypical when you run the same kind of traffic as the real railroads did.
