Great Northern’s Red River, 1950-1967

Fred Klein, 2010, 2016

Shorter haul trains like the Red River are less glamorous than the premier trains like the Empire Builder, but they extend the railroad’s service area.  The Red River ran from St Paul MN to Grand Forks ND via Fargo ND through the Red River Valley. It connected with CB&Qs Afternoon Zephyr for Chicago passengers. Originally named the Red River Limited, it was replaced by a new trainset built in 1950 by ACF. The Red River was built in the same year as GN’s International train. The Red River made a round trip to St Paul daily starting in Grand Forks at 7:30 AM and returning around midnight. The Red River traversed the GN mainline between Fargo and St Paul. The coach cars are 60-seat short haul (not designed for sleeping) cars with the long windows. The long-haul coaches carried by the Empire Builder had reclining seats and shorter windows. You can find more information at http://www.gngoat.org/the_red_river.htm.

 

Great Northern’s Red River. GN publicity photo.

 

The Red River crossing the stone arch bridge in Minneapolis, page 124 of Great Northern Railway 1945-1970 photo archive, Byron Olson ed., Iconographix, 1996.

 

All Red River cars said “Great Northern” in the letterboard. The model cars from Con cor originally had “Empire Builder”, but this lettering was only used on that EB train even though the cars were similar. You can mostly model the Red River with out-of-the-box cars. The Con cor coach uses the GN car built by ACF in 1947-1950 as a prototype and is accurate. The Con cor coach must be re-lettered. Some of the coaches in the model train are made by Walthers. The Walthers cars are lettered “Great Northern”, but are based on Pullman Standard coaches of the 1950 era and have a very similar appearance but fewer small windows at the ends. The Red River is one of the shorter (and therefore easier to accommodate on a layout in HO scale) “pike” trains featured in Andy Sperandeo’s book Model Railroader’s Guide to Passenger Equipment & Operation. The prototype consist is from that book and the gngoat.org website. If you have accumulated GN passenger cars from various sets for other trains as I have, you may have the Red River cars already. I try to represent trains with prototype or near- prototype cars, often number the cars to be in the right series, but I will rarely change numbers to match a specific train.

 

 

 

First part

 

Power was an E7A diesel made by EMD in 1947. The Life like model is very accurate, but I re-lettered the factory orange lettering to yellow. The RPO-baggage had a 30’ RPO section and a 55’ express baggage section. The Con cor model is accurately based on this ACF car as a prototype. The first short-haul coach is a prototypically accurate Con cor model. This is the same short-haul coach used on most of GN’s postwar trains.

 

Second part

 

The next two short-haul coaches are Walthers models. They are PS rather than ACF prototypes, but are otherwise very nice. The observation car was special built by ACF in 1950 for the Red River and was unique on the GN because it included a lunch counter and dinette section as well as an observation section. The model car by Kato is similar to the 1950 ACF Red River car, but is based on a 1941 PS prototype with bedrooms in addition to the observation lounge. Kato lettered it for the “Port of Vancouver” observation parlor as used on the 1950 International train. A sister but not quite a twin.

 

 

REFERENCES

Randall, David, From Zephyr to Amtrak, Prototype Publications, 1972.

Sperandeo, Andy. Model Railroader’s Guide to Passenger Equipment & Operation, Kalmbach Books, 2006.

 

BACK TO THE PAGE OF PASSENGER TRAINS