Hello all,
A friend of mine ,came over this evening. He brought me two boxes of old 50’s trains. The train set is athearn die cast…the road NH.Most of this stuff i’ll most likely use ,as for the rest, don’t know.
Also inside the box,a bus system…kind of like a RC set. Plasticville kits,tools ,a euro trolly by fleischmann, model train mags from the 50’s. The train set locomotive is an old school rubber band drive and looks like it hasn’t ran in years. Roundhouse die-cast freight cars ,track,switches ect ect.
The train god’s are happy today.
Patrick
Well now Patrick, it looks like the same angel that sprinkled pixie dust on ‘scuba’ Terry earlier today, also visited you as well![swg]
Those die cast metal freight cars from Roundhouse, assuming the paint is in decent shape and the metal has not distorted or cracked due to impurities, often can look pretty darn good. Somehow painted metal looks more like painted metal than painted plastic does. The tricky thing is couplers – not easy to mount Kadees on the old Roundhouse cast coupler pocket. Also because the frame is metal you might want to use the Kadee plastic couplers rather than the metal #5s.
Just be careful and not force things or put too much pressure on it. The metal may look hard but sometimes that old zinc allow gets very brittle with age.
Dave Nelson
Sounds like you got the deal of the day. I always like it when someone gets something old that they want to do something with on there layout. Its like your raising the dead almost! I do this quite often too.
If you can find some appropriate sized rubber bands, you will quickly see why the old timers LOVE current Athearn drives!! Enjoy the time travel into the yester years of the hobby
Will
Those rubber bands are still available from Athearn, or they were last time I looked. My LHS actually ordered them for me. Unfortunately, my old band-drive engines ran very poorly. I ended up pulling out the motors and running a couple of them as dummies.
To replace the couplers, I took my Dremel and ground down the original mount so I could mount a complete Kadee with a draft gear box. That way, I get the metal coupler and the box provides the insulation. On a GP-9, I had to hollow out the metal pocket to fit the box in, but now it works great.