I got lucky and scored 3 40’ modified AAR Boxcar kits from Intermountain yesterday. These are 10’6" height with 6’ doors, 5/5 Dreadnought ends and Murphy roofs. Here’s a mini review for those who haven’t tried them yet. The kits are undecs of course (The only way Intermountain sells kits)
They’re roughly comparable to the Branchline Blueprint kits, so I will be contrasting the two.
The kits go together quite nicely in general. Assembly involves attaching the frame and ends to the main body, then adding details, as opposed to Branchline’s sub-assembly based procedure, although you can do the ends either way (As you can for the Branchline kits).
Assembly steps are:
Attach the roofwalk to the roof. Two options are given here, you can either remove the mounting posts from the roofwalk (Which are also the sprue) and mount to the roof, or you can drill out the post holes in the roof and mount with the posts. Intermountain recomends the first, and that is what I did. It looks very good. Roof grabs mount in dimples without any drilling.
Next is attaching the frame to the main body. This requires some sanding of the sprue attachment point to get the frame to fit properly. The frame is keyed (A nice difference from the Branchline kits) and extends from bolster to bolster. There is no frame past the bolsters though. The frame also appears somewhat heavy compared to the Branchline frame, it includes a trainline, which looks very thick. Brake rigging is one piece, with major components mounting directly to the body. The appearance is excellent from the side, but some bits are lacking (Notably there are only two air pipes into the 3 way valve). A 2 piece brake rigging assembly would allow more accurate rigging, but likely wouldn’t look any better when the car is on it’s trucks. There are seperate pieces for glad hands and the connection between the rigging and the B end brake gear. The glad hands and the extra rigging bit are very well done, and Branchline would