How accurate to the prototype should I expect model trains to be?

[Trainman203]

Model railroad manufacturers would rather make money on salable foobies with low production investment instead of losing money on accurate prototypes with specialized tooling that sell few.

My favorite example is the Missouri Pacific blue and grey Eagle merchandise boxcar.  The prototypes were all rebuilt from very low 36' and 40' wood boxcars.  There are plenty of merchandise cars around in HO but all of them are stock tall 40' AAR standard steel boxcars, not close to the short prototype at all. The only accurate version ever made was a craftsman resin kit long years ago, but the foobies keep coming and keep selling.  Even Bachmann had one as a track cleaning car.  No one ever got the paint scheme right either, did no research and typically painted the ends/roof  blue instead of the correct grey and got the grey/yellow door wrong.

The hilarious thing about these cars is that in real life they were very few and never interchanged off of the Mopac, but thousands upon thousands of foobies  run on model railroads of every prototype and many non prototype, since very few modelers actually model the MP, I am one.  And I run one foobie AAR car, with the closest to accurate paint.

[RAM]

trainman I did not say, or even think that you ran trains without cabooses?  I was just adding that a train is not a train with out a caboose.   

[Trainman203]

Oh, ok.  I agree totally.  A train without a caboose is a sentence without a period. The "FRED" don't cut it.

I often run two cabooses, one for passengers on my mixed train and one for the crew.

[PhillipL]

Oh, ok.  I agree totally.  A train without a caboose is a sentence without a period. The "FRED" don't cut it.

I often run two cabooses, one for passengers on my mixed train and one for the crew.

That is a great idea!  I have a very small layout (6x4) so most passengers cars cannot make my curves and those that do just don't look right.

[Terry Toenges]

A caboose train sounds good to me. I can't remember what other On30 cabeese are out there beside Bachamnn's.  You can have "observation" cupola cabeese and standard passenger cabeese without the cupola. There are cabeese out there with little bitty windows that could be baggage cabeese and not to forget the drover "combine" cabeese".
I've been wanting shorter passenger cars than the ones Bachmann makes in On30. Maybe I could just shorten roofs from Bachmann passenger cars and put them on Cabeese.
I don't know if there are prototypes for that out there.

[Trainman203]

Drovers cabooses with side doors are really good for passenger service on small Branchline type layouts.  The Bachman 1860's combine, painted Pullman green with improved truss rods and handrails, is also a car type used up into the 1950s on shortline mixeds.

http://www.athearn.com/Search/Default.aspx?SearchTerm=Drover+Caboose&CatID=THRF&OA=True