A few days ago, I bought a couple Bangor & Aroostook HO decals for a 50' plug door boxcar. Vince and I had conversed on this project. This is intended to continue the conversation on same. A quick look and I thought maybe a Walthers 50' PD car was close, now not so much. Any ideas, on a good HO candidate to model a BAR 50' plug door boxcar? Atlas has a model, but needs work, not into rivet counting, just a close model. These Red, White and Blue cars were a site to see, on a train with so much drab colors. BAR did a great job of promoting their RR with these cars. Archives.net Jim Parker photo;
Okay I'm here lol. G looks like an old DW single door car. Your really tempting me to build this car soon lol. What about an Athearn later style blue box RailBox car. Let me see if I can dig it up for comparison.
I was also looking at the Walthers ACF boxcar, but the door and sill are wrong. The prototype car is a Berwick 5310. They have since been repainted into Oxide Red, but they are still around. RRpicturearchives has a lot of newer photos, and it looks to be a pretty large class of cars. The only 50' Berwick car I can think of is the Branchline kit (now Atlas). I have one in the Railbox scheme, but again, it doesn't have straight side sills around the corner stirrups. The 5310 looks to have about the same sill height, but the door track placement is different. You could sand down the Atlas car to get the track closer to the bottom and reduce the truck cutouts, or build up around the trucks to reduce the cutouts and keep the sill thickness. I don't think the door is a separate part, so cutting is required, but the Branchline kit / Atlas RTR car will have the correct sides, roof, and ends. All you need to change is the door and sill details (and maybe the thicker posts on either side of the door if you are ambitious. The rectangular cutouts on the bottoms are pretty distinctive.)
Thanks Mr.T I bought a couple of the Atlas version this afternoon, I think filling in the notches a bit on the side sill ends would be best for me, I can find some plug doors I hope. Maybe sand down that bottom door track but that doesnt bother me much. Looks like the model needs cushioned drawbars too.
The draft gear definitely sticks out more than the stock Atlas one does, but it is hard to tell what kind of cushion system it has. I'm using the crossover platform to eyeball the distance. The Atlas gear doesn't even extend past it, but the BAR car looks to extend out about twice as far out as the crossover platform is. Moloco comes to mind when I think about those kind of detail parts. They don't have a Berwick-specific one, but any in stock should look alright. The door opening is 10 feet. Accurail has a plug door that may fit, or you may have to scratchbuild one to get a higher level of detail.
I have some Details West 10' plug doors, although they will need just a couple parts added to each, but shouldn't be too bad. I think I can use some Details West CC-1009 end cushion devises will work. I will need to get a better more detailed look to see what kind of cut bars, I got bunch of the Plano parts. As for other parts, just have to see what comes up.
My decals or as they say on the other side of the big pond. Dekals lol Just arrived today looking forward to this. Now to find a pair of cars to victimize lol.
I have made some progress on this little project, I dont know why, but I ended up doing 2 cars. I decided on Atlas Berwick cars as the ends were right along with the side ribs and roof, but thats about all that was right. I was surprised to see there were like 3/4" metal nuts super glued to the floors over the bolsters, no where near centered. One was IC the other CNW, got them for the right price. So as usual, I make more out of this project than I should have. I had to add some to the plug doors, they needed a couple levers added as well as 6" to the height, which led to me having to fabricate new wheels and linkages for the doors. I milled out the sliding doors and added the modified plug doors, what a pile of plastic that left. The next milling project was to mill a chunk out of the sills for that modification, then glued .030x.100 styrene in place, it was then the coupler boxes were milled off, the door tracks shortened along with some other details milled off, by the way there is a .010 difference in the thickness of the side walls from the floor to roof (not uncommon account molds). It was then I clamped the cars again and milled those little notches towards the end of the sills to match the images I have, milled the lower track for the doors off some, as well as milling those .030x.100 plugs off flush with the rest of the sills. I then added a bunch of styrene details (door stops, small tack boards, bolster add-ons and some end details. This all resulted in the steps being lowered about 1/16" too. I used Details West 1009 coupler boxes, KD metal drawbars, Plano cut bars and some scale lumber for the large tack boards. After a couple nights of wet sanding to remove lettering and such, we are ready for a soapy water bath, drying, and primer. I am going to enjoy these Red, White and Blue BAR cars. Here they are sporting some really cool caboose shop trucks. I enjoyed this but I aint doing it again LOL. Thanks for stopping by.
Yes I'm taking the easy way out. It's that thing called good enough lol. Have them in the Que but still a ways off. Great looking work on the car(s) Might have to email you when I build mine.
Those are looking super fresh. I like seeing unpainted models because all the modifications and separate parts are visible. Once painted, the mods will be subtle, yet significant. Any modeler should appreciate the work it takes to make an accurate car. The tooling is of course ex-Branchline, and those 3/4" nuts are a hallmark of their freight cars. I have the wood reefer and the REA express reefer, both of which have the nuts in the kits. There is a little compartment built into the box that holds them separately. I think it's super cool. I never opened my Atlas car to check if they retained them, so I guess they did. I think they will turn out to be real nice cars. I took a liking to that design, so my most recent project cars have weight over the bolsters or at the ends, not in the middle of the car
Thanks Mr T! I have taken this approach on many projects. I do enjoy the process, maybe trying to figure out how to make the mods is what I most enjoy, if not trying to figure my way out of a total mess too. I always try to add weights above the bolsters as well, but I at least try to center them, these were both glued towards the same side, the car was not going to track well. So, I did the super glue dis-solver thing, and reset the nuts with silicone.
I just got an email that my Scalecoat paints have been shipped! Only 3 weeks after the order was submitted and paid for. Now if I actually get the stuff in the next couple weeks things are really going good. I may think about buying some lotto tickets.
That is actually an interesting observation that the weights were not over the car centerline. My Atlas model definitely has a wobble. I can't tell if it is loose trucks, a bent axle, but maybe it is a balance issue because of the weights. I have done some work on it, but I haven't ran the car enough to see if I fixed it.
Got My paint from Scalecoat MFGR. I regret to report one of the bottles leaked enough to make a big mess, as the caps were very loose, the thinner leaked enough to melt some of the packing "peanuts". Not happy with the service, no returns on emails or phone calls, for a week now. Anyways, got black on the underframe, in a day or two, will get the Blue on both ends and one side of the cars.
While doing a little more research, I have found that either side of images on these car, the Blue is on the right side of the car. Another little wrinkle. Beginning to see why these paint jobs went away, sooner than later.
