Special Edition Boxcar: ASARCO Boxcar

Here we have an interesting boxcar that most of you probably have not seen or even heard of before this posting.  Back in 1951 the ASARCO corporation bought 250 PS-1 40 foot boxcars for their various operations throughout the United States and Mexico. The order was split 125 cars to be manufactured in the US and 125 cars to be built at the Pullman Plant in Mexico City.  Back in the mid-1960's Richard Meyer made some ASARCO decals for the Mexican cars that ASARCO operated between their manufacturing plants in Mexico and their giant smelter in El Paso, Texas.  Since I was employed by ASARCO until I decided to retire a few years ago, I thought it would be a neat thing to model one of these rare cars for my O scale layout.  So here it is!!!  The car is a former All-Nations boxcar that I found again at another train show.  The car was in rather bad shape and needed a lot of TLC.  I stripped it down to the bare metal and the rebuilt the car using several detail parts from Selley Custom Finishes, Cal-Scale, and Keil-Line.  I chose to add Lionel Operating trucks so it could operate on the Proto-HiRail layout I have.  The paint is Floquil boxcar red and the decals are Champion as I mentioned earlier.  If you look closely you will see the bilingual decals and markings for both English and Spanish as was common for these cars when operated out of El Paso to various ASARCO plants in Mexico.  For the History buffs who follow this blog, ASARCO is still in business today as a subsidiary of GrupoMexico and operates copper, gold and silver mines as well as the Copper Basin Railroad in Arizona.  Hope you like the car and the little story that goes with it.  Bill