I now have a passager train of Athearn blue box CB&Q. How do I disassemble them to add some lights and some people? Any hints will be appreciated.
All my Athearn Bb passenger cars have a tab in a box near the bottom center of the car. Just spread the tabs and the bottom will fall out. You can see the tab in this photo near the left side of the box
Art,
It depends if they are the ‘heavyweight’ or ‘streamline’ cars. The HW cars have a tab at the center that you spread and lift the body off of the chassis. If they are the streamline cars, it is a little harder. The top slide on and is very tight! Work along the end of the car(under the diaphragm) to get them started.You should be able to ‘rock’ the upper body back and forth to release it from the lower part of the car. If these are the RTR cars, they may be ‘glued’ together and are almost impossible to get apart!
Jim
Art,
Jim pretty much covered it as far as the disassembly of the cars is concerned. Most of my streamlined passenger cars are Athearn BB kits. The BB cars pull apart as Jim described. None of mine came with interiors so adding seats and bulkheads is going to be a project.
I light my streamlined and heavyweight BB cars with a single bulb and home made electrical pick-ups. I diffuse the light with a sheet of common copy paper.
There is a description of the process on my website on the How’d You Do That page.
Palace Car Co. makes interior kits for Athearn (and many other) cars. The floor insert is painted metal, so it adds nice weight to the car.
With the streamlined cars in particular have a supply of small toothpicks ready at hand to slip in as soon as a small gap appears.
And it should be pointed out that with a used Athearn car there can be many unknowns. If a prior owner botched the assembly of the kit, or broke off the little tab, or took them apart so enough that the cars started to rattle, they too might have used a little glue to address the problem.
I myself used to lightly glue the floor on Athearn house car kits just to avoid having it push into the car. Just enough to give it some stability.
I have also seen cars where the guy added weights to the interior and globbed on so much glue that floor was glued to car sides above the trucks.
Even then it might be possible to gently force open the car. But it is also possible to crack the car side – I speak from experience. Just name the mistake and I can tell you what’s it’s like to do it!
Dave Nelson
I’d also add that while you have the streamliner cars apart, apply some poofs of graphite to the sides of the bottom before sliding them back into the car body. This will assist in making it easier to get them apart again. I had a set that the prior owner glued the heck out of. The cars were underweight, so I wanted to add weight to them. I ended up gluing small fishing weights into the cavities underneath, then painting them.