I was at the hobby store one day, prowling the aisles when one of the senior employees walked up with an armload of hard to find old time freight and passenger cars he had managed to score for me by poking around his netwrok of suppliers and distribution houses.
He was happy, I was happy, as fast as he showed me one, I was tucking it away under one arm and reaching for the next.
Inevitably, the piles shifted and one of the slick glossy lightweight cardboard boxes shot out of the pile, propelled as if it were a watermelon seed, describing a near perfect ballistic arc well away from either of us, to hit the floor about four feet away. I was embarrased, he was embarrased for me, I picked it up and we moved the conversation on to other points of discussion.
It never even occurred to me that the car would be damaged, but later on, unpacking at home, the initial assessment was grave. On first view, the boxcar seemed to be missing a truck and a coupler. This was an illusion.
Apparantly the prime impact was directly on the car’s coupler, end on to the floor. It drove the coupler back and up, shoving it entirely inside the body, and causing the car’s floor to bend in a 40 degree curve, wedgeing the coupler and truck and floor up inside the boxcar, spreading the walls out to the splitting point.
On inspection, the key to rehab was to unscrew the opposite truck, screw the screw back in the truck hole on the boxcar’s floor, and use needle-nose pliers to unseat that end of the car, removing pressure from the far end still wedged in the body. Then repeating that trick with the other end and an extra pair of hands finally freed the bent and broken boxcar floor.
The plastic of the floor was cracked, nearly through, but I hit a streak of luck. The car used a steel plate running the whole length of the floor to add weight, and it was fixed to the floor in two places to keep it from moving around. With some contact adhesive and some small clamps, I was ab