In this post I'm just showing you the condition of two hoppers, of a six car set, my dad picked up quite cheap at a rail ex here in the UK. The reason they where cheap, to me, is evident...
I'm not one for criticising other people's work, so I'll let the pictures show you:
These are Athearn Ready to Roll, basically, built up blue box kits with metal wheels and knuckle couplers in a fancy box. Nonetheless they match prototype design, lettering and numbers. They may not be accurate to the 'enth rivet but near enough for us.
What the above does mean is that they are easy to disassemble and will hold up to enthusiastic handling.
I wanted to preserve the factory lettering so stripping the cars was not an option. Unfortunately whatever the previous owner "weathered" the cars with was resistant to my attempts to remove, so I had to "salvage" the cars as much as possible.
The prototype we are modelling is 1956-1960 so for this mix of liveries would mean a differing level of aging. Obviously a bit of exaggeration on the worse cars would have to be performed.
Railroads in the 1960s weren't any more keen to clean cars regularly than railroads nowadays. Cars were repainted after being shopped for major works and the latest livery applied. So the newer the livery the newer/more recently shopped the car was and hence the cleaner it will look.
I will be posting the outcome of my ventures with these hopper soon and I hope you'll agree that they a major improvement over the state depicted in the above pictures.
Hope you'll join me then.
