In the reality of this impoverished short-line, the M&LS never owned very many freight cars of their own. Most of their equipment was handed down from the Ann Arbor or the Wabash and often carried the primary reporting marks of the parent company with smaller stencils to show the cars as being assigned to the M&LS. A consultation with Hugh Hornstein's book on the M&LS reveals a few random boxcars from the Wabash and a small number of company flat cars that serviced the small group of captive M&LS on-line shippers.

 

With the creative license one is allowed in a 1/160 version of the M&LS, I decided that when the Wabash called in the note for its boxcars, M&LS management simply claimed they had been destroyed in a wreck and then burned the car-bodies and basically stole the frames for conversion to log service.

 

Fortunately, the M&LS lettering for those "loaner" Wabash boxcars is available in N Scale, so I purchased a set along with some scrap Walthers cars and stenciled up my own custom fleet of M&LS logging equipment using the actual numbers from the boxcars that the Wabash had banished to the Upper Peninsula, never to be recovered! 

 

My miniature M&LS crews understand these cars are never to be interchanged, lest their chicanery be discovered! You'll find these cars in service on the lower deck of my Ann Arbor layout, hauling logs from the Schoolcraft County wilderness into the City of Manistique.​