I was stationed at Ellington AFB in Houston for 9 months in 1970-1971. G&G was our “go to” hobby shop. It was run by Gus Frietag, brother of Gil Frietag. We always referred to it as Gil and Gus.
Gus was my go-to guy at G&G. Those guys were very kind to a 15-year-old kid who had no money to amount to anything. They knew I could only afford a couple blue box kits at most and let me look at them to see what I wanted. That place was my Model Railroad Shangri-La.
The great joy of being stationed in Houston was the San Jacinto Model Railroad Club. One member invited everyone over on a Sunday afternoon to run their own locomotives on his HO railroad. Gus showed up with a Lionel and Gil showed up with an HOn3. They placed them on the track when the railroad owner wasn’t looking and then they complained their locomotives wouldn’t fit. I had my camera ready to get the owner’s facial expression. It was a great club with great people and it still is.
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And three railers have three times the fun! 
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Especially when one’s age is in the single digits!
Getting back to the original business of Heritage Cars on the layout…..
I’m not exactly sure at which point I jumped into the world of what were called craftsman kits at the time, but it was probably not long after I solidly cemented my interest in steam era branch line railroading. I was becoming well aware that not many plastic kits at the time were offered in realistic box car red with relatively subdued reporting marks, and I had not yet discovered decals.
But in a blinding flash of light one day at the G&G Model Shop I opened a Silver Streak double-sheathed wood boxcar kit and was overcome with what I could actually have on my layout. I got two of them, one lettered for Frisco Fast Freight and the other for the Southern Railway. I’m sure I did a terrible job building them but the originals are long gone to see how I actually did. But I really wanted to have those cars back on my layout even though they’re pretty crude compared to today’s finely scaled cars….. which I did not see back then.
I knew that I didn’t want to go through building those kits again since they basically are painted/printed sides with unpainted wood and diecast metal parts that you had to match paint to…. Not difficult back in the Floquil days but more so now. So I sought already assembled cars in the online auctions. And I have to say, it’s just unbelievable to find how many chimpanzees think they can build these cars and then try to sell them as if they are in pristine condition. It took a very long time to find cars that looked like the paint was relatively well matched, and relatively cleanly assembled with all the seams closely matched as best as possible, which was almost impossible to find.
I did finally find one of each and bought them, but was not surprised to find that once in hand they really weren’t as clean as they looked at the photographs. I had to remove the metal ends from the Frisco car and shave some wood off the end block to get the ends to fit better. Even then it’s not great. The ones I built when I was 15 years old probably weren’t great either, but I have to say they looked great to me back in the Jurassic.
Here is the eBay photograph of the Frisco car, which looked good until I got the car and saw the stuff that didn’t show in this picture. The paint is as nicely matched as I ever saw with any of the cars I looked at, but many things were done badly …. and not apparent due to creative photography.
What does show in this photograph is that one truck is set too far in from the end of the car, which makes the car look lopsided once you notice it, which you don’t at first but once you do it’s a maddening thing that you can’t tolerate until you do something about it. Which I finally did. It doesn’t show that the end ladders were very idiotically glued in catawampus random fashion on the end. I had to take them off to put them in the right location, but of course that took paint off the metal end. I wasn’t ever going to match it so I just got a rust rail marker and swabbed the bare places with it and it actually doesn’t look that bad. Also, the brake wheel which you can barely see in this photo was installed sticking through the roof walk, how someone thought that was eighth is beyond me.
Every car like this is going to require new trucks and couplers, and these cars were no exception.
The online photos didn’t show the other side of the car.
I did not see until I actually had the car that the chimp had installed the door sliding to the wrong side of the car, to the left, which is not standard practice, done once in a blue moon, but certainly not on the Frisco that I could tell. That I’m just going have to live with.
The Southern boxcar was a much better experience.
But it was not as nice as a restoration job I did for a friend a few years before which came out a lot better.
Without asking me, he gave it to some 11-year-old kid with a train set. I don’t even want to think about the horrible death it has probably died by now.