The prototype. Railway Post Office (RPO) cars were a common sight on the head end of most American passenger trains for nearly a century. Built to United States Postal Service specifications, RPO’s operated with a crew of postal employees who handled the mail. The RPO crew collected mail from rural stations on the fly, sorted everything, and then dispatched bags of mail from the moving trains.
Santa Fe was still upgrading its postwar streamlined passenger trains with new stainless steel cars, so ten lightweight RPOs were built by Budd with 60-foot postal apartments. Delivered in early 1954, RPO car nos. 89 to 98 had 63-foot fluted carbodies, full skirting, and four-wheel type 41-CNS-11 trucks. The trucks were later replaced with better riding 41-CDO-11 trucks. These RPOs were assigned to Santa Fe’s streamliners until the Postal Service cancelled its mail contracts in 1967.
The Walthers model is an excellent replica that matches an HO scale drawing and photos published in the reference book Head End Cars, by Frank Ellington and Joe Shine, published by the Santa Fe Railway Historical & Modeling Society.
Black moveable plastic diaphragms just touch when the RPO is coupled to another car and the slack is pushed in. However, there’s a slight gap between the strikers when the slack is stretched out.
Construction. The RPO follows the standard construction used on recent Walthers passenger cars. A one-piece box frame with openings secures the sides, ends, and roof with small latches. Two steel weights sandwiched between the floor and the interior conduct power for a lighting kit (sold separately).
The car has four windows on one side and five on the other due to the interior’s sorting racks and mailbag stanchions.
Proto-Max magnetic knuckle couplers mounted in swinging coupler boxes allow operation on 24″ radius curves. The couplers are at the National Model Railroad Association’s standard height.
The trucks have metal sideframes with insulated plastic bolsters. All the wheelsets have NMRA RP-25 contour metal wheels and stub axles pressed into acetal plastic axle tubes. The wheelsets were in gauge and provide eight-wheel pickup for interior lighting. The truck rolling qualities are fair, but lubricating the axle ends, as recommended in the instructions, makes a difference.
Overall, this new RPO from Walthers is well done, and it’ll be a great addition to any model of a lightweight Santa Fe name train.
Manufacturer
Wm. K. Walthers Inc.
P.O. Box 3039
Milwaukee, WI 53201
walthers.com
Road name: Santa Fe (first release in the El Capitan train series)
Era: 1954 to 1968
Features
- Accepts Walthers DC or DCC drop-in interior lighting kits
- (sold separately)
- Decals for car numbers
- Weight: 4½ ounces (1 ounce under NMRA Recommended Practice RP-20.1)
- Vacuum-plated metallic finish
I love it, no so much the car itself, but the fact that Walthers is providing the El Capitan for the large number of Santa Fe modelers.
I ordered the complete set on May 6th last, the first day they we announced.
Reading the review you get the impression this is a new model. But isn't this RPO exactly the same car that was released with the initial run of the Super Chief? Did Walthers change the molds or did they just install the grabs and steps?
Can anyone comment on the ride quality of the Santa Fe's and other lightweight RPO cars compared to the older heavier ones? I know at least some heavyweight coaches (including the ones the Erie modernized) rode better than some lightweights. Since the postal workers did much of their job standing, they may have been especially conscious of how various cars rode.
The New Haven bought some of these cars from the Santa Fe, but I'm not sure it ever used them, let alone put its own name on them.
Once again, comparison with other models of the same real cars in the same scale would be very useful. Athearn has produced a reasonably accurate, though notably less finely detailed — no separate grab irons, for instance — and decorated model of these cars since the 1950's; despite price increases over the decades, it's still much less expensive. Walthers itself has also offered sold earlier versions of this model (with grab irons provided but not installed and finished with different degrees of shininess) at lower list prices than that of the new model.