Passenger cars - authenticity

[Meiriongwril]

I've read that many of the Con Cor passenger cars in HO for the Southern Pacific are non-authetnic in that the SP didn't run cars of the type Con Cor has painted in SP colors. Does anyone know if this is true also in N scale? I.e. how authentic are Con Cor N scale passanger cars??

 

[TexDoc]

Con Cor passenger were not road specific. They were all the same in any particular series, just different paint. Generic is the best word to describe them.
Some fit perfectly since many roads bought similar Budd or other make cars.
Doc

 

[60103]

I think the con-cor cars were all models of something, but not always what they were painted for. You'll probably find this true for most manufacturers. I think the newer ones where they sell a whole train of California Zephyr cars may be alright, but where they have the same body painted for 10 roads, at least 8 are probably wrong.

 

[railohio]

Passenger cars are one of the still hard-to-model areas left in the hobby. Some railroads purchased stock cars from manufacturers, some copied manufacturers' designs in their own shops, and some just "free-lanced" (as we'd say) with their own designs.

If you are sincerely interested in modeling accurate Southern Pacific passenger consists then I'd strongly suggest you invest in at least one of the many volumes on the subject from Four Ways West, Morning Sun, or even Motorbooks.