Kitbashing Erie 37500 Series Gondola

An so the endless waltz of car roster improvements starts with two old gondola to be bashed as close as possible to Erie prototypes. The idea is not to make exact replica, but to put enough efforts so the models can be credible. I've bought sets of dry transfer from Clover House suitable for Erie 37500 series. These cars were initially built as drop bottom gondolas until they were later rebuilt with fixed floor. While I've been lucky enough to find as built picture of Erie cars, my search for rebuilt car wasn't rewarded by any significant results. For more information, Ronald Dukarm wrote a short but informative story about these cars on railfan.net.

For this reason, I ask any reader that can point me decent sources of information about these particular cars to contact me. Many books and publications about Erie cars have been released over the years, but sometimes, it can be quite hard to find out particular prototypes when you have very little information about them except length, road numbers and sparse details.

In fact, I'll have to build (or rebuild) many boxcars and gondolas following Erie practices. Thus, I'm quite open to acquire relevant books/magazines on these subjects. However, I'm not that much familiar with Erie and would prefer to purchase books based on educated suggestions. Factual data over nostalgic books would be better. For the boxcars, Don Hanley's excellent series of articles in Model Railroad Hobbyist back in 2013 is an excellent starting point. I certainly would love to have better information on gondolas.