SL-SF 17691

Now for a car from a little further afield. In order to add to the variety of my roster, not only do I have cars from neighbouring roads but from distant roads too. This is one of those said cars, a factory painted Kadee PS-1 40' boxcar. These are quality cars with lots of details and separately applied parts, coming from the factory with metal wheels and scale couplers. A quick snip and grind of the trip pin, adding 7g of weight and it's ready for service following weathering.

NKP 16103

This Nickel Plate Road 40' Boxcar is a Branchline Yardmaster kit, now sold under the Atlas marque, like the Bowser kit it is a good robust model. I like these kits having built a few over time and they first turned me on to hardware for weighting purposes, they come with two M12 hexnuts to use as weights! An ingenious use of a readily available and cheap resource.

The builder has the option of modeling the doors as working or fixed shut. The ends and roof a separate parts so it makes for easier modeling of cars with different end or roof colours based on prototype. It was common in the 40s/50s for the ends and/or roofs to be black while the car sides boxcar brown. This batch of NKP cars had black roofs and ends and Branchline painted them accordingly. The only thing I had to correct was the brake wheel colour as that was brown in the kit and should be black to match the prototype.

Even the Yardmaster line of Branchline car kits came with RP25 metal wheels so no need to substitute. I drilled out the pins on the coupler covers in order to replace them with threaded screws and then fitted Kadee #158s. Again I fitted Kadee trainline hoses and Detail Associates cut lever bars. This time painted black and then weathered the whole car for 1953-56.

VGN 62023

Another Virginian Car, this time a 50' Automobile Boxcar.

Bowser factory painted kit. One of the coupler mount spigots was deformed so I ended up drilling it out and replacing with a piece of styrene tube drilled out to accept the factory screw. This was an unbuilt kit so I got to build it up entirely from start to finish. Nice kit, basic but well thought through, I do see the coupler spigots as a weak point, needing a sheath to accept Kadee couplers.

I replaced the plastic wheels that came with the kit with some 33" smoothback Intermountain wheels, fitted Kadee #158 scale couplers.

I added Kadee Train line hoses and Detail Associates cut lever bars. Painted with Tru-Color freight car brown, not exact but once weathered blends right in.

VGN 303 & VGN 305

First up is a pair of Cabooses for Virginian Ry

Both of these a factory painted Atlas cars, lettered to represent VGN class C-10 cars. They are not 100% accurate but pretty close for out of the box models. For all they are hard to get hold of, I've been on the hunt for over 5 years, they aren't as hard or expensive as brass cars so a decent stand in for now.

I like Atlas cars as they always run well with metal wheels and they are a good robust quality.

My standard is Kadee scale couplers so these are fitted with #158 and have had the trip pins cut.

The cars were a touch under NMRA weight guidelines so a little bit of added weight and all comes into line.

Being Trainman models they don't have huge amounts of detail and separate detail parts, the end grabs are molded on but a little yellow paint highlights them enough. The minimum detail level I try to attain is train line hoses and cut lever bars as most cars lack the end detail but these are quite obviously missing from side-on viewing to me.

Back Again

Well I've neglected this for a long time, arguably too busy and when I finally got around to do some modelling it been more for myself. It does mean I have plenty projects to update on.

I'm going to restart with some freight cars I completed the other week.

Athearn Genesis Big Boy Upgrade Pt1

Being fans of big steam as we are, a UP Big Boy is a must for our collection. So bought brand new from Trainworld earlier this year was a model of 4018. Factory fitted with Tsunami sound and illuminated numberboards are a nice touch too!

Apart from 3 of the 4 wheels on the front pony truck being loose in the box (Athearn check your quality control!) what a fabulous model, the Tsunami is such and improvement on the MRC and the detail level is very high.

However a few (to me) glaring issues... the tender, trailing and pony truck wheels have all been chemically blackened, but are still seriously shiny! This is not that uncommon on models nowadays but what is unforgivable to me is the bare metal shiny axle ends poking out the centre of not only the pony truck but the driving wheels!

This I feel is ridiculous from a manufacturer as big as Athearn and puts a dampener on what is otherwise a great model.

Below are pictures of the 2 minute fix I made to greatly improve the look.

Before:

After

I think you'll all agree an essential task.

The other main improvement is the fitting of a Kadee #148 on the rear of the tender!

There are issues with the tender coal load which I will address in a future post.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

Rescued B&O Hoppers Part 1

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.