Is PENNZEE still in business?

They have been out of business for a long time. The Full Throttle hoppers an are pretty good alternative. Both are made by Bowser.

Full Throttle's 100-Ton Rib-Side 3-Bay Hoppers are identical to the former Pennzee hoppers. They are actually made using the same molds. The Full Throttle hoppers all have the product number FTPZ----.

From Full Throttle's product description: "By special agreement with PENNZEE, Full Throttle is immensely proud and excited to offer this important and historic hopper for use in Z Scale. These hoppers remain a mainstay in railroading, even today!"

Try contacting Full Throttle asking them for what you are looking for. Full Throttle is small 1 man operation, so Will might be willing to do something custom for such a large order. ZSM has several dealer exclusives from them (Custom Runs), so I know he does this. The only issue is minimum order size. MTL will do a custom car with a minimum order size of 100 cars. Just politely ask "I would like to build a 50 car unit train of 100 ton porters, and was wondering if it would possible to include 50 extra undecorated bodies in the next production run or painted in scheme in 'your road here'?" and see if they would be willing to accommodate that. Then maybe they will do a run of the cars in the road you are looking for with 6 unique road numbers and you will just have to live with repeating numbers.

www.wdwfullthrottle.com/contact.htm

FYI, the Full Throttle cars are pretty easy to strip.

When I was trying to use Micro-Sol to remove numbers, that process almost would always removes the paint too. (and ergo doesn't work as intended)   So I would imagine that 91% IPA would make short work of an entire car.   

And, btw Undec's do exist.   I'm not sure they are from the Pennzee years or more recent but I have a few myself awaiting attention.  I might be willing to part with a couple, let me check and see how many I have.

  
Do I care?  Not especially.   But the camera does.

My m.o. has always been....I mostly only care about numbers as far as the camera can focus.    Practically that's maybe 5 or 6 cars max on a unit train in a typical "wedge" photo with focus stacking.   So with only two numbers, yes I'll make some effort to add a few more.   Plus, for the BN "rotary" cars the reporting marks were one panel off, which is a little more noticeable from afar.

Actually, armed with the info that the Pennzee/FT lettering doesn't come off clean like AZL's (and MTL's to a lesser extent) I maybe wouldn't have tried it.   But, live and learn I guess.

And btw, I'm not asking Will to do more numbers.  I would buy them if he did another 2-pack of the BN cars that I covet, but really otherwise I'm perfectly happy with taking matters into my own hands if that matters to me that much.  I do agree that it's diminishing returns to do more than 4-8 numbers in Z probably.  Maybe 8 for something like the Bethgons that are PURE unit trains versus these 3-bays that could be unit or not.   But if I had good decals and knew the removal process was consistently clean,  I would still consider renumbering cars beyond that.  To each his own, but that's part of the fun to me...if it can be done fairly easily.

I have a couple Milwaukee Road rolling stock, really hard to find multiple road numbers, so I'll change something on it, like a different colored door, or a patched out section that looks like a fresh repair or a little weathering over the reporting number, stuff like that.

Makes them different from each other, even though some are the same road number.