Picked one up cheap, since it was a number I didn’t have among all the kits I have. Upon opening it, several things were immediately obvious.
The first is that one of the door operating mechanism pieces was not attached and had fallen loose in the box. These are the only tricky pieces on the kits so it’s no wonder the army of low-wage assemblers had issues with this. No biggy, just glued it back on myself.
Second - the wheels. While it nicely comes with metal wheels, they are not in even the most liberal definition fo the word ‘blackened’. On the contrary, they are quite bright and shiny. Replacement with P2K wheelsets is in order, or some painting with grimy black paint.
Third - I still can’t like the 3-piece Accumate couplers. Kadees are going on there.
Otherwise, this car is exactly the same as any of their kit ones, just preassembled, plus metal wheels. I’ll stick with the kits, while they still make them. Lettering and so forth is crisp and clena and easily readable, and the weights come painted black. The overall quality of the carbody is the same as the standard set by the Accurail kits, and since the kits are so easy to assemble, there’s little need to spend more.
Are these the Accurail 2500 series USRA cars? Looking at the Accurail site it appears that the ready to run cars are missing the crank mechanism that they include with the kit cars. These tiny pieces are one of the part 4 items on the Accurail instructions, http://www.hoseeker.org/accurail/accura55tonhopperusra2500.jpg.
Our club did a bunch of these as a club car project, and it took awhile to figure out which way these were to be applied (and there is a proper direction according to Accurail).
Nope, they’re on there - one of these is what was loose in the bottom of the box in mine. Yes, I always have trouble with these. I’ve done several dozen of these kits, often like 6 at a time, and I usually get the first one wrong after starting back up again. I usually assembly-line them, after painting all the weights. I then go through and glue all the weights on, then attach the brake gear to each underframe, etc. I cut allt he pieces off the sprues ahead of tiem and put each part in a compartment of a storage box (or an egg carton, those work well, but don’t knock it over! My storage boxes seal tightly so if it happens to fall the parts stay in). It’s those darn crank things though, those are hard to hold in palce a touch glue to. I use the tiniest of those microbrushes but Tenax will seep in under ANYTHING, including your finger as it tries to hold the part on.
The first thing I do with ANY Accurail car–kit or RTR–is replace the Accumate couplers. I think they would work just fine if my layout were level, but I have long 2% up and down grades, and the Accumates tend to ‘split’ on downgrades. For me, that’s their big failing, so I automatically replace them with Kadee’s.
I’ve only got a few of the Accurail hoppers, all of them kits. The brake mechanism is a tricky little devil, and even installed, doesn’t look quite right. As to the wheels, you might want to try MicroMark’s Neolube–a little of it goes a long way and it does a nice job of ‘blackening’ the wheels. I use it on a lot of RTR metal-wheeled cars. Accurail isn’t the only RTR model with ‘silvery’ wheels by a long shot.
I hear you - first thing I do with . loco or car is replace whatever couplers with Kadees.
The small USRA hoppers all have the brake lever detail molded on, not seperate pieces. The 3 pieces of air tank, triple valve, and brake cylinder work ok once it’s all together since it’s kind of hidden. Anyway, mine’s all fixed, the loose part is glued back on, the couplers have now been repalced, and the wheels have been replaced with P2K. It also needed a few turns of ‘the tool’ to get the wheels to roll free. While I had it out I also did the same to my P2K caboose, now it actually ROLLS - out of the box they have the brakes on, literally, as the brake shoe details rub the wheels. They just press fit through the truck bolster so I popped them out, and also bent the contacts out of the way (the single interior light is hardly prototypical, and at full DCC track voltage will melt the roof). Entered both into my database, and now I’ve actually accomplished something railroad-related over this long weekend.
