Hello,
I’m wondering what kits would be best for me at this point. I’ve mastered the Accurail kits, but I’m looking to improve my skills.
Any era is fine, but price must be decent.
Hi,
They’re a little bit of a jump in skill level but I’ve always enjoyed building the extensive line of Proto 2000 from Life-Like car kits. These were made roughly 15-20 years ago but are attractive models by today’s standards.
You have to be careful with snipping the grab irons off the sprue but they build into excellent looking rolling stock.
Chinese Red CB&Q by Edmund, on Flickr
IMG_0110_fix by Edmund, on Flickr
The hopper cars are a little tricky with their numerous, wire, corner grab irons. Generally it helps to clean out holes with a #79 drill.
LL_hopper4 by Edmund, on Flickr
(Yes, the W was missing! I fixed it with a decal, though)
L-L produced tons of these things and many can be found on the secondary market in the $15-20 range.
Intermountain is another manufacturer with a good line of HO kits:
IMG_9780_fix by Edmund, on Flickr
Good Luck, Ed
Anything by Red Caboose or Intermountain are similar to the Life-Like Proto-2000 kits Ed mentioned. Just avoid the Intermountain Caswell Gondola kit. It is a booger to put together.
If you run into difficulty, post a question in here, and someone will help.
After a few of these, build a Tichy kit, then move on to resin kits!
Quit when it stops being fun.
-Kevin
After Accurail I would go in the following order
- Bowser
- Branchline “Yardmaster Series”
- Red Caboose or Intermountain
- Proto 2000 or Branchline “Blueprint Series”
Once you can put together a few Proto 2000 and/or “Blueprint” kits, you’ll be ready for craftsman-like kits like Funaro & Camerlengo or Westerfield.
Tom
Hi Pennsy_l1,
I will agree that the Proto 2000 kits are a good place to start to up your kit building skills. Some of the parts are pretty delicate (the kits provide extras because you will break one or two), and as was said, you are best to drill out the mounting holes so that the grabs etc. go in easily.
However, the Proto 2000 kits also provide a great opportunity to learn how to make your own hand rails, steps and grab irons. Working with the extremely delicate grab irons that come with the kits can be very frustrating. The alternative is to make your own grabs out of wire. I recommend 0.0125" phosphor bronze wire from Tichy Train Group. It is sized to match the roughly 1" diameter prototypical grab irons, it is easy to bend and it is solid enough to withstand any handling, which the supplied plastic grabs may not.
https://www.tichytraingroup.com/Shop/tabid/91/c/ho_wire/Default.aspx
You will need a set of small pliers with different jaws, something like these:
https://www.micromark.com/mini-hand-tools/pliers-nippers-cutters
You can make styrene jigs to allow you to produce evenly matched grabs and steps. It does take a little practice.
Maybe doctorwayne will chime in to show you some of his work. If he does, try not to be too intimidated. He is pretty good at what he does.
In addition to the other manufacturers that have been mentioned, Atlas Trainman kits are pretty good but they are a bit rare. Also, Walthers older kits in the white boxes with blue stripes are nice too.
Something that I have gotten into which I real
Gidday, Ok, all very good advice so far but depending on what skills you’re actually wishing to improve, I’m going to put it out there that an Athearn blue box freight car kit is a great step.
Unless you can get an undecorated kit, you can learn how
to paint strip,
to remove cast on moulding,
to thin roof walks,
to make your own grab irons and steps,
to drill # 79 holes (preferably with out breaking them, a problem that the Bear has [banghead][banghead])
to paint,
to apply decals,</
[quote user=“”]
Pennsy_I1
…I’m looking to improve my skills.
Gidday, Ok, all very good advice so far but depending on what skills you’re actually wishing to improve, I’m going to put it out there that an Athearn blue box freight car kit is a great step.
Unless you can get an undecorated kit, you can learn how
to paint strip,
to remove cast on moulding,
to thin roof walks,
to make your own grab irons and steps,
to drill # 79 holes (preferably with out breaking them, a problem that the Bear has )
Also, do hardware stores sell the kinds of drills and bits that I need?
Hi again Pennsy_l1,
What type of motors exactly? If you are talking about older locomotives with Pitman style open frame motors you have two options. One is to replace the magnets which is fairly easy and inexpensive to do, and the other is to simply replace the motor with a more efficient can motor, which also is fairly cheap to do in most cases.
Here is a thread on how to replace the magnets:
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/p/244634/2725871.aspx
I will leave it to others to explain how to install a new can motor since I have never done it.
It might be helpful if you could tell us exactly which locomotives you are working with.
Dave
Oh Boy, going from building Accurail kits to scratch building locomotives, now that’s a GIANT LEAP!!![(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D]
However, far be it for me to poo hoo you ambition, so I’ll link you to one of RDGCasey threads for inspiration…
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/255180.aspx?page=1
EDIT, found some more…
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/p/252686/2821758.aspx#2821758
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/p/248717/2783711.aspx#2783711
…. there are more of his build threads to be found on the forum.
Have Fun,
You might not need to. The over-abundance of PENNSYLVANIA brass steam locomotives has caused the prices for these to come way down.
It might not be too much longer before they hit your “resonable” price point.
My STRATTON AND GILLETTE steam locomotives are all USRA designs in brass by Sunset, Key, Alco, and Tenshodo. The price came down to about $200.00 for each, and I became a consumer. I have about a dozen now, and it has worked out well for me.
-Kevin
Years ago I gave my model railroad friend a Proto 2000 box car kit as a holiday gift. About a month later, he gave it back to me and said “Thanks for the thought but there is no way I am even going to attempt to build that”. It is still sitting on the shelf in my train building as a retirement project.
Tichy is the way to go. They make kits that are used by others for their RTR cars. They made Ertl’s cars and still make some of Intermountain and a bunch of others, sometimes parts or sometimes the whole car.
I would suggest Tichy after a few Intermountain, Red Caboose, or Proto-2000 kits.
Tichy kits require drilling and brake rigging. The instructions are never fully clear on how the brake system components should be installed. Assembling the air reservoir and cylinder on the Tichy A/B brake sprue can be very frustrating, not to mention trying to drill those #72 holes into the reservoir filtings.
The Tichy kits are great, but they should be worked up to.
I still struggle with Tichy tank cars. I pretty much just buy brass models for tank cars now.
-Kevin
The O.P. mentioned that price was an object, and I understand that when new skills are being learned. And there might be money that needs to be spent on some tools that have not been needed up to now. The original LifeLike Proto2000 freight car kits are often seen unbuilt at train shows (remember those? [sigh]) for as little as $5, and of course you take what you can get in the way of prototype. I’d start with the flatcar if you can find it.
The days are long gone when the first of what I’d call “complex” plastic freight car kits was the Kurtz Kraft PS-1 boxcar kit from the late 1950s. It came without trucks or couplers in a plastic bag and sold for 89 cents! Or was it 79 cents? Separate ends, sides, roof and floor, separate ladders and grabs - and this came at a time when plastic had the reputation of being for inept modelers and kids. Not many modelers actually had any skills back then working with styrene. Just about the time modelers got good at assembling Kurtz Kraft kits, the line disappeared. The next similar car a few years later was the Pacific HO mechanical reefer which Silver Streak and later Walthers ended up selling. But again once you learned and got good at it (meaning your first car might be a bit rough around the edges and there were also design flaws inherent in the Pacific HO mechanical reefer that Walthers was never able to cure) there was little to no other line of plastic kits that your newly acquired skills could be applied to.
That is why the Gould plastic kits - tank car, flat car, locomotive crane – were such a revelation at the time when they came out, oh I think 1980 or so. And once again skills had to be learned, although by that time there was more kitbashing and scratchbuilding going on in plastic as well as kit modification, so for some guys the skills were there. The Gould line is now part of Tichy’s.
I mentioned the Life Lik
I’ve built a few Tichy kits, flatcars and boxcars. The kits have a lot of small parts, and the brake components make for a nice model even if only you know they are there.
I get these kits undecorated and they’re very reasonably priced. Because they were all planned or non-standard use, idler flats for the carfloat and hide service for the tannery, I printed my own decals and did my own rattle can spray painting. These skills are part of kitbuilding too, so here’s a chance to work on those, too.
[quote user=“Pennsy_I1”]
Pennsy_I1
…I’m looking to improve my skills.Gidday, Ok, all very good advice so far but depending on what skills you’re actually wishing to improve, I’m going to put it out there that an Athearn blue box freight car kit is a great step.
Unless you can get an undecorated kit, you can learn how
to paint strip,
to remove cast on moulding,
to thin roof walks,
to make your own grab irons and steps,
to drill # 79 holes (preferably with out breaking them, a problem that the Bear has )
At the price of new can motors why tinker around trying to repair a motor.
My thing is restoring old locomotives to as good if not better than new out of the box.
The Mabuchi motors are very powerful and work very nicely in HO locomotives. Most Neodymium magnet motors draw less than half the current and have more than double the power, best of all is the low cost.
The Mabuchi SF266SA 12 VDC- 6900 RPM No load single 2mm shaft costs under $5.
I have remotored well over 30 HO steam locomotives using either the Canon EN22 or the SF266SA motors. The EN22 is getting hard to find and the price is increasing. I buy the SF266SA in bulk for around $3.50.
I install a pair of SF266SA motors in my Rivarossi articulateds.
Two SF266SA motors draw less than half the current of the Rivarossi motor with four times the power. I add 10 ounces of weight to the boilers and that more than doubles the drawbar.
Mel
Pennsy,
P2K is your next step. Stock cars, box cars and gondolas are good bets. These kits have good trucks and they supply proper weight with the kit. You will have to replace the couplers. As for the plastic grabs, you can replace those with wire but I haven’t had problems with the plastic grabs and I have lots of these cars on the layout.
Dealing with individually installed grab irons is usually the thing that hangs up most people moving to the next level of kits. Make peace with installing them and you will be well on your way…I did an article years ago for another magazine on batch building cars and I timed how long it took to do each step in a batch of P2K stock cars. Cutting the grabs from the sprue and installing them took the most time.
Tichy and resin kits require painting and decals which is another step up the ladder. Re-detailing old Athearn cars is a good learning experience but lots of effort for a less realisitc product. However, I have redetailed several old blue box kits just because I like the cars, especially the 50’ express fruit reefers.
Lots of ways to go, Buy a few kits and give it a shot…
Guy
I’ve also built a number of Proto 2000 kits of double-deck stock cars and boxcars. These are a bit more complex than Accurail kits, and make slightly nicer models. These I have bought as decorated kits, so only some additional weathering is needed.
Like all my rolling stock, these got Intermountain metal wheelsets and Kadee couplers during assembly.
I got these some time ago as Walthers Flyer closeouts. That is a good place to look.