I need some help with picking which company to go with? I’m planning on putting a coal train together and would like everyone’s opinion on which cars look the best and which ones will look ok sitting next to each other. I recently moved from N scale and have been buying as much stuff as I can to get my trains back together in HO. Now I’m to the point that I’m ready for a coal train. In N scale I had a 60 car train of E&C “LBF” cars. I guess I should say that I’m looking at the BNSF corporate logo. You know the black and silver cars with the white BNSF lettering. I know that all three companies make this car just need to know whose cars look the best and which ones look ok running together. I know that LBF probably has the most car numbers I think the other two have about three sets of six out. So for sheer numbers LBF would go to the front. But I have not seen one in HO and don’t know how they look. Any help would be appreciated. Mike
The only coal cars I have owned were a pair of walthers ones, they were so light and with no place to add weight unless they was loaded all the time lead to them being put on ebay.
i have about 90 coal cars from all 3 makers and i don't like lbf to much work to make them run right jeff
They are all pretty light - empty. If you can find older Roundhouse units with die-cast frames - well they are heavier. Not easy to find - especially a volume of them. I hope this helps, Mark.
Haven't had any experience with modern RTR LBF - but certainly the older kit stuff had a fair 'fiddle factor' to get them running reliably - yes, lots of numbers tho! Walthers cars are basic but fairly nice. Whilst they may be a little light they are a unit-train car, so provided all the cars are that light it probably isn't an issue. These come in 6-packs. The Athearn cars come in 5-packs, so one less than the Walthers, detail on those is excellent, wire end grabs and the like. Easily the best quality car of the three and I think they come with (removable) coal loads too which the others don't. One axle in a pack my friend bought was live across the axle, giving a dead short whenever that car was on the track - a pretty unusual fault (and a real pig to fault find as well!) Although easy to fix when we worked it out! My friend has a set of Walthers ones and a set of Athearn's, the Walthers are being loaded with the Athearn coal loads, that adds a little weight to the Walthers ones, it hides the fact that the Walthers interiors are very basic, and shows off the very nicely detailed interiors of the Athearn ones! To my mind the Athearn and Walthers are too different to mix up in a train - you might be able to mix LBF and Walthers depending on paint colour? Remember in that BNSF set you could also mix in a few other BNSF (or BN) schemes on the Bethgon, or I guess you could probably mix in a couple of other types of rotary dump coal car like the Walthers RD4 hopper (BNSF) or Bethlehem hopper (BN) depending on the era you're looking at - a little mix like that might compensate for a lack of road numbers for the scheme you want maybe?
If you are wanting to copy real life, then it matters if your are modeling before 1980's or after. Real trains of coal cars were often mixed with whatever cars happened to be available at the time they were needed. In later years special made coal cars were assembly line produced for specific railroads, so you can see longer strings of the same kind of coal car more today than back then.
Just checked the Athearn site, and if you're feeling brave (and/or have robbed a couple of medium sized banks) they do enough cars to build a 120 car set of BN/BNSF bethgons! BN - 6x packs of green/silver BN - 3x packs of green/black BNSF - 3x packs of black BNSF - 6x packs of silver/brown BNSF - 3x packs of 'stainless' and brown (less brown, more modern scheme?) BNSF - 3x packs with 'Wedgie' logo (not yet in shops) Total 24 packs of 5 cars each = 120 cars.
