NSE recently issued some MT Mobilegas tank cars with photo etched high walkways and handrails Would anyone know if the walkways and handrails can be removed and reinstalled? These cars are perfect for a custom project that I've been wanting to do.
they look to be glued in place. It looks to hard to remove.but not impossible. you would have to be careful not to bend the walkways.
I passed on that car, the high walkway is nice but the car still has a low walkway that wasn't removed. The cars didn't have it both ways.
MTL did not create the walkways, they were done for us by Russ Kaufman at the N Scale Architect. Fred sent a message to Russ to ask if they could come off, and he says yes, but be extremely gentle. He said he "might" have a couple frets left, but he wasn't sure, so ask him directly about that. As to the lower walkway, yes, it is true that the prototype didn't have full length upper and lower walkways, but we find that if you do a little cutting and rearranging of the MTL underframe it is pretty darn close. The high walkway versions still have end walks, so it isn't a complete redo. We don't have any drawings of where the brake hardware was placed on the underfame, but from the photos it doesn't seem all that dissimilar from the lower walkway versions. But we certainly bow to better informed modelers on that subject. . As always, there are financial decisions to be made whenever you are doing an unusual prototype like this one. In this case, we chose to go with the closest we could get s a starting point and did the upper structure to have the unique spotting feature of this car. As the walkways were folded, painted, applied, and glued by hand and paid hourly, we did our best to keep the cost down, but it still came out to the very top of our comfort zone. Since we are doing all of this work in the good ol' USA, the extra cost of cutting off the walkways was something we thought would not be a good ROI for the buyer, as it is so easy to do it themselves. It is a cool looking car though, I hope you enjoy it.
I've not seen even a photo of this car, but I can say that in general if the walkway was not seriously bent, like folded over on itself, it wouldn't be tht hard to straighten withour anything noticable. And I don't know whwat they are glued with, but again generally, all it should take is a delicate touch. Pretend you are a home watchmaker.
