Box Cars and Tank Cars in the Late 70s and Early 80s

[conrail1973]

Good Evening,

I happened to pick up an Atlas RS11 (Conrail #7652), and it has me wondering about freight cars during the time it was in service.  It looked like this unit was sent to the scrapheap in 1981, so I was wondering if anyone could help with the following questions.

1. How was corn syrup transported prior to the production of the Trinity 17.6K tank car ?  I'm modeling a breakfast cereal plant, and I wonder how much corn syrup was used back in the 1970s.

2. What type of 50' boxcars were used during this time?  I have quite a few Atlas 50' ACF box cars, but I want to see what other types of 50' box cars were in use during the 1970s.

3. Conrail Atlantic Region Voulme 1 has a nice spread of Allentown Yard on pages 86-87 from 1978.  For the Conrail/Eastern/1970s/1980s modelers out there, what percentage of predecessor/fallen flags rolling stock do you run on your layout?  In this spread, you can spot a Pennsy hopper, boxcars from numerous roads inherited by Conrail, and C&O hoppers mixed with rolling stock from Conrail and Chessie.

This looks like an interesting era to model, and I hope this gives me some ideas while I wait for some more free time to spend working on my layout.

Thanks,
Adam

[nkalanaga]

From Wikipedia:
"After being classified as "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1976,[24] HFCS began to replace sucrose as the main sweetener of soft drinks in the United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup

As for boxcars, almost anything from the late steam era to Railbox and IPD cars could be seen.  The old MDC, now Athearn, cars are from that era, and almost any car with the traditional "wrap-around" ends would be fine, unless it was too old.  There were even a few MILW horizontal ribbed cars still in service.

[conrail1973]

Thanks for the info on corn syrup.  I'll definitely keep my eye out for some of the box cars that you mentioned.

Thanks,
Adam