Thirty-nine thousand. 

That’s how many H21 class hoppers were built by the Pennsylvania Railroad. To put that in some perspective, that’s more cars in one class than the Missouri Pacific, Nickel Plate or Rock Island had cars of ALL types on their rosters! Put another way, through the 1950s one of every two PRR hoppers was an H21! This is a car that every modeler needs!

The H21 was a four-bay design with many construction cues from the smaller GLa hopper. Designed first as a 50-ton coke car, the H21 class cars were built between 1909 and 1914. Very quickly it was realized that they would make great coal hoppers, and the first cars were converted to H21A with the addition of 70-ton trucks. Additional groups of H21As followed. Early batches were built with clamshell doors, but the design changed to four