About 5 years ago we made the decision to produce our own brand rolling stock with the formation of North American Railcar Corporation. This decision provided us the ability to produce state of the art cars with higher quality and superior accuracy at a reasonable price.

When we announced our first car, the Hawker Siddeley 4550 cu ft 4 Bay Cylindrical Hopper, there was considerable interest and some questions as to why we had picked that car. In the real world, these cars were both produced in large numbers and both used together in large numbers. By selecting this similar, but uniquely different car, we were making it possible for modelers to operate more prototypically accurate consists on their layouts. Additionally, some operators only use Hawker Siddeley versions of these cars.

As accuracy in detail was our goal, we took the time to speak to many people familiar with the prototype cars. We also spent many hours photographing and inspecting the actual cars. As a result, we built the tooling to produce all 15 different structural variations of the car built by Hawker Siddeley over the production run of the prototype.

In late 2011, we released 11 different paint schemes of our HO Scale Hawker Siddeley 4 Bay Cylindrical Hopper covering both grain and potash versions of the car. In the beginning of 2012, we sent samples of all of the cars to Model Railroader. Due to other projects, Model Railroader did not have the chance to fully evaluate the cars and write a review until recently. We were not surprised to see the folks at Model Railroader were just as impressed by the cars as our customers have been. 

Since the publication of Model Railroader's review of our cars, we have had many orders for these cars and requests for access to our PORTERS System. We are contacting customers as quickly as we can and appreciate your patience. We appreciate the support of our customers who have previously purchased these models and welcome the many modelers who have recently become aware or our products.

Our production runs are limited to 50 copies of each road number and are not repeated in that paint scheme. Each road number is thoroughly researched and represents an actual real world car. Currently, we have limited numbers of these cars in stock.

Customers who have ordered the new 4000 cu ft Canadian Coal Gondolas will soon see the same quality and detail from North American Railcar.

For those of you who may not have seen the review in the February issue yet, please enjoy it courtesy of Model Railroader: