Welcome on board! There are several - Micro-Trains offers great looking cars (on the higher end of the price range); Atlas is probably the best for the dollar; Athearn has started to offer some good looking stuff. The funny thing is that Industrial Rail offers a Chessie System hopper that scales out right on the money - comes with old style Rapido couplers, but what do you expect for 2 bucks! Really it depends on what type of car you need - do some research and go to the manufacturer's web site or to a retailer that has on-line pictures of the car and do some comparing.
I have been quite impressed with the few Red Caboose cars that I have purchased - I wish I had more of them. Atlas makes good cars as well and some are more detailed than others, but probably not as much as MT or Red Caboose but for the money a reliablitly they are quite good - most of my rolling stock is Atlas. There are certain manufacturers that I would stay away from, but I am not in the habit of dogging any one publically. Details on model railroad rolling stock and engines is like a lot of things in life - you normally get what you pay for ... but not always sometimes they are just proud. Mr X
Best freight cars? That's going to depend on what type of car and what era you model in. Different manufacturers excel in different types of cars. Micro-Trains makes over 100 different varieties of cars. Some of these are the best available, others have stiff competition from other manufacturers. Then, there are the resin car and rpm car kits for unusual models that you have to assemble paint and decal yourself. So, what specifically are you looking for?
Don't forget Intermountain's fine quality transition-era and modern cars! :thumbs_up: As for kits, Alan Curtis Models has supposedly been bought, and Fine-N-Scale is good, too. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. :shade:
3 Foot Rule Then there is the 3 Foot Rule - To me they all look alike at 1 foot. For otherts it may be 3 or 4 feet. Where the details really show up are in photo graphs which when published online are 2 to 3 times the veiwing size.
Grey One, you made a great point. I have seen people that took a "cheap" car, properly gauged the wheels, added some extra weight, weathered them up - and from three feet away they look really good. Most of us are not planning to have close up pictures published - we just want to re-create railroading as we see it, or as we saw it as kids, or in some cases bring to life an era we were born to late to be a part of. I am always impressed when I see someone add super details to a locomotive or car, but I'm at the age that even at one foot away, the detail tends to disappear.
The curse of the digital camera! As far as freight car detail,unfortunately we now live in the age of the digital camera. I do my detail work using a 3x magnifier with a 60 watt bulb and it used to be that anything that passed muster using that looked real good on the layout. Then I bought a digital camera and all of a sudden the quality of my workmanship declined drastically! All of a sudden a 3 inch long car appears to fully occupy a 17 inch screen and this is crooked, that's too thick, and there's a glob of glue over there...mg: Same thing happened to the quality of freight cars from the manufacturers as well, requiring a quantum leap on the amount of detail required to satisfy those who own digital cameras. :embarassed:
A very subjective question and one that has as many answers as there are modelers, and possibly more! Realistic depends not only on the base car, but also on the paint scheme in which it is painted. Most if not all manufacturers take liberties with matching body styles to some degree or another. This is nothing more than compromise with respect to available resources although many have their favorites to pick on, including me. Given the compromises that are required simply to manufacture items at 1/160th their original size, there is in fact no completely accurate N Scale model available, period. There have certainly been great strides to reach closer to that unattainable ideal in the past 5 to 10 years. Thus it's all a matter of taste and what you're willing to live with. This can often vary inside of one person's accumulation, in fact-- an as close to correct model of an item used by one's favorite railroad may be the desire, but an OK model for a connecting line may be just fine. BTW I assume it was you who asked the same question on the N-Scale list. You should get some interesting answers there...
