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Atlantic Coast Line USRA/P-5 Light Pacific and Train Pack

611 Hype Man here with another reskin set, and today we're returning to the ACL and to Neighbor Kid's USRA steamers. Today, we have the ACL's USRA Light Pacifics, which were the backbone of both passenger and freight service on the ACL until larger and heavier steamers came along. Oh, there's also some green heavyweight cars, if you're into that thing. Alright, onto the history...


The Atlantic Coast Line was an American railroad serving the...Atlantic Coast. Who'd have thunk it? Starting in Richmond, VA and running as far west as Birmingham, AL and south as the southern tip of Florida, the ACL was founded through an amalgamation of existing small lines in the Southeast. The railroad would run its first official train in 1900, and would acquire tracks all the way to Florida two years later with their purchase of the Plant family system. Competently run (as most southern railroads were in the 20th century), the ACL was successful enough to fund major infrastructure improvements on their lines in their first two decades, and acquired a controlling interest in the Louisville & Nashville and Clinchfield Railroads by 1927. The ACL was rivals with the Seaboard Air Line (which was a railroad, paradoxically enough), which served all of the same destinations as the ACL and operated in all of the same areas. The two lines both catered to freezing Northeasterners with their year round luxury trains running all the way from New York to Miami, later to become the competing streamliners of the ACL's Champion and the SAL's Silver Meteor. After WWII, the ACL continued to innovate, revamping their entire freight and passenger car fleet that allowed them to stay competitive in the face of an ever expanding network of interstate highways and airports. Nonetheless, ACL management could see the writing on the wall and started talks with their longtime rival, a process that would result in the Seaboard Coast Line merger of 1967 and the end of the ACL. SCL would prove to be much more successful than a certain other 1960s merger of two historic rivals (hint: they're in the Northeast), largely due to a lack of brainrot in either management team, and would go on to be a founding partner of modern day CSX. Now, on to the locomotive itself.


World War I was an interesting time for the railroads of the United States, with their inability to provide consistent service leading to their temporary nationalization under the US Railroad Administration (USRA). While the USRA's reputation as a rail operator is mixed, the standardized steam designs they made during their existence were immediate hits and spawned countless copies n modifications. The ACL received a lot of USRA locomotives, including the lion's share of the Light Pacific design, 70 in total. These locomotives were classified as P-5-As and were mainstays in passenger service up and down the East Coast. The Light Pacific design was successful enough that ACL went to Baldwin in 1922 to build a modified version suited for both freight and passenger service, designated P-5-B. These locos were well adapted to the mostly flat ACL, and 165 were built over 4 years, making them the predominant mainline freight haulers on the route and outnumbering the ACL's 2-8-2 Mikado designs by a factor of 4 to 1. Both classes of Pacific served up until the very end of the steam era on the ACL, although newer steam locomotives like the R-1 4-8-4s had taken over some of the longest/heaviest trains starting in the late 1930s. Although many of the ACL's steamers would disappear into the scrapyards in the 1950s, P-5-A #1504 was preserved as a static display loco in Jacksonville, FL, and is currently being restored by US Sugar Co. But this isn't the only reskin in this mod...


Heavyweight passenger cars were everywhere in the steam era, and they were predominantly green until the streamlined era added a ton of color to the US railroad scene. The ACL was no exception, and many heavyweight cars remained in green liveries well into the 1950s and 60s, including many sleeping cars acquired secondhand from the Pullman Company. Now then, on to the...

3 Variants: P-5-A (early)/P-5-A/P-5-B
Introduction Date: 1919/1922/1922
Retirement Date: 1930/never/1954
Road Numbers: Randomized between 1500-1569 for P-5-As, 1600-1799 for P-5-Bs
USRA Short Tender
Asset versions with fixed numbers for each!

Introduction Date: 1915
Randomized numbers for Baggage and Coach cars
Randomized names for Parlor, Sleeper, Diner, and Observation cars
The cars have been put on the patented Meatball Hero diet, and are now slimmer than ever!

Neighbor Kid for the main USRA Pacific mod
theMeatballHero for the Heavyweight models, random numbers, and random names
MC Couplers
Excellent sounds by Mrcheesecake

Neighbor Kid's USRA Light Pacifics
theMeatballHero's Pullman Heavyweight Starter Pack

"From Pennsylvania folks are traveling, down to Dixie's sunny shores..." - Perry Como

I hope you boys like the ACL, because more mods for them (mostly streamliners) are in the pipeline, and will get here when they get here. As for now, you'll most likely see another steam loco reskin from me next. But, you never know...