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Photo of production model

Decal artwork shown enlarged for clarity

Reading 50 ton "fishbelly" hopper (N Scale)
 

THE MODEL

This is an Atlas N scale 50 ton two bay fishbelly hopper with die cast underframe, ready to run with a removable coal load and AccuMate knuckle couplers installed.  It is painted in the roman lettering scheme with the red "anthracite" herald.  All printing was done by Atlas except the road numbers and the reporting marks.  A decal sheet is included with at least 10 NEW complete road numbers.  Hundreds more can be easily made with only one splice of the decals.  The decal was created from Atlas' artwork, so is a perfect match for the printing on the model. 

100 unnumbered cars have been produced in 2007 exclusively for sale by the Anthracite Railroads Historical Society.  The price is $13.00 each.

THE PROTOTYPE

The so-called "fishbelly" hopper design was developed by the Bethlehem Steel Car Company in 1936 as a way to deliver a higher volume of coal in a lighter car.  Per weight of the car, this design was able to carry more coal than the 1918 USRA design or the 1926 offset side hopper, because the deeper sides of the hopper provided more volume with lighter empty weight.

The Reading Company built a total of 1,000 hoppers of this design, probably from kits supplied by Bethlehem Steel, in 1941.  They were of welded construction, and were assigned class HTo, numbered as 80000 - 80999.  53 of the original series were still on the RDG roster in 1968, down to 8 in 1975, and all were gone by the time of Conrail.

3000 additional hoppers of the same basic fishbelly design, some of composite construction, were delivered in 1942 through 1944 in four different series.