Passenger Cars, Late Steam, Early Diesel era. Could use some help Best selection for same. Would like to have interiors and lights. Having hard time deciding. Any pros or cons of different choices would be appreaciated. Thanks Jim.
Well, THERE'S a big kettle of fish. I suppose the question is how prototypical you want to be, what your skill level is, and what you can affoard to spend. For just running on the average layout the Athearn cars are not bad, and reasonably priced. They're designed for 18" radaii and their construction is well suited to interiors. Isolated trucks are available from Athearn for lighting. Next in the quality spectrum is the Con-Cor card which build similar to Athearn, but are available in a wider range of body styles and two lengths. the shorter (72') cars are designed for tight radii and the longer (85') are prototypical, but need wider curves. 85' cars will run on 30" radius track, but look funky. 36" raduis track is much better. The Con Cors also take interiors well and I have used several for custom projects. Probably the most common HO passenger cars are the IHC and Rivarossi 85 footers. These are available in just about every pain t scheme under the sun, and each manufacturer makes interiors for their cars. The IHC interiors are kits and the Rivarossi's are single piece castings. I've kitbashed both for many projects. The IHC/Rivarossi's eun good, but I prefer to body mount the couplers on them to prevent seperations. The final option on plastic cars is the new Walthers which are very nice cars with included interiors and seperate drop-in lighting, but they are stupid expensive. They come ready to run and in my limited expierience they seem to run great. Beyond that, there are a couple of more exotic options. The first is brass which tends to be expensive, but is usually the only way to get a correct model for a specific prototype. Prices can run anywhere from $30 for a Balboa up to well over $500 for somthing in particular. Most of the brass cars I have have required extensive work to get running well and t really hurts when one takes a dive off the layout. Finally, there afre the exotics. This can range from extruded aluminum cars (Blue Line, Kasiner, Sampson, etc.) to Brass car sides, to old kits. These usually take a lot of work, but on the other hand can yield a finished product every bit as nice as brass, at a fraction of the price. If you have any more questions feel free to ask and I'll try to answer them.
Wow, that was a pretty good report there! A couple of questions back to you to help you get the answer you want.... What road or roads are you looking to model? What sort of layout do you have? If you have a small layout (say a 4x8) there are some big advantages to using the Athearn/Con-Cor "shortie" 72' cars (you can fit more in to a given train length and they look less silly on sharp curves) and the railroad you are modelling may determine wether you want smooth or corrugated side cars, which can affect the choice of manufacturer (all the Walthers and Athearn streamliners are corrugated side ones for example.) All the best.
