Does anyone know if New England Rail Service still is in existance? If so, can you point me to a website or some way to contact them? I’d like to track down a coule of sets of their add-on half door kits for Accurail wooden boxcars.
These add-on kits make an interesting boxcar that much more interesting.
Thank you!
dlm
A lot of half doors were used for boxcars shipping grain in the old days. Typically, they weren’t anything fancy. Basically, they just built the half doors out of plywood. I would think making your own half doors out of craft store balsa or NESL sheets would be even more prototypically accurate.
I have a couple of Walthers Proto grain cars that are just that.
In Western Canada we used cardboard “reinforced” with sheet metal lath to board up the grain car doorways while pouring in the grain. The boxcar door then just held back the cardboard! Later “designs” introduce tiny pairs of doors, often coloured red or yellow, into the steel box car door on one side to facilitate loading. Then of course the boxcars were almost replaced with covered hoppers, usually with trough openings for grain but early ones still had the port type.
The Grizzlies on CP mainline through the Rockies depended on that cardboard leaking…
Maybe you can find out something from the following discussion:
Sorry guys. I’m not talking about horizontal half doors but rather vertical ones. Once added to the car, you end up with a dor-and-a-half car. These were made to fit right onto the side of the car. That car being the Accurail eight-panel SS boxcar.
dlm
Looked some more. Hobbylinc.com website implies they have them. 1st item on left column:
http://www.hobbylinc.com/prods/urc_ner.htm
Don’t know if true or not. And I know nothing about Hobbylinc. So if there is a phone number, you should probably call.
Good luck.
Hobbylinc claims to have the long discontinued MRC Tech 6 6-amp version in stock, too - maybe they are truly legit but it seems odd they have discontinued items actually in stock. I fear they may just list the Walther’s catalog.
–Randy
Here is a photo of an Accurail car that I used these doors on. I ordered the door kit from Walthers, but I don’t know if they are still available or not.
‘Live’ version of the link maxman provided:
Part of the value here is that it contains e-mail addresses for Don Valentine… use with care.
Maybe it’s all still good but Caveat emptor.
New England Rail Service is out of business, which is a shame. They made some fantastic passenger car parts.
I ended up paying premium prices for their Air Conditioning kits for Rivarossi passenger cars.
Their website was newenglandrail “dotcom”.
-Kevin
Or if you are Cody Grivno… “dot cooooooooom”
[(-D]
–Randy
I hope that they are, as they made some very nicely-done details for upgrading boxcars and passenger cars.
Here are some door-and-a-half cars, some with the Standard Car Company doors, and some improvised ones, too…
…and grain doors, too…
Wayne
How unpleasant it is to see that a domain-name ‘squatter’ has acquired that domain name and will only let it go for over $3700.
That in itself would indicate Don Valentine would use a different name for a renewed Web presence…
Wayne,
Som really nice cars here. Do you care to share comments on the “improvised ones??!?”
dlm
I’m sorry. Can we back up a sec? What is the purpose of these vertical half-doors? Is this also for grain transport?
-Matt
I’m not sure, but I think that the half-door was to accommodate loading of larger items into what were originally single-doors per side (some were only 5’ wide). The half-door didn’t require the underframe to be “bulked-up”, as was done when double-door cars made their appearance.
The last photo in my earlier post does show an ordinary boxcar with wooden “grain doors”, back in the time before covered hoppers. The grain doors were originally planks temporarily fastened to the inside of boxcar. The grain would be funnelled into the car through the open space at the top, then the sliding doors were closed.
When the car got to its destination for unloading, the doors would be opened and the car tilted (both laterally and longitudinally) to empty the grain.
Later, heavy cardboard-type grain doors appeared, more easily removeable, making it easier to completely empty the car.
I do miss the New England Rail Services items…not just the half-doors or the parts for modifiying and detailing Rivarossi heavyweight cars, but also for their proposed multi-version models of Dominion/Fowler 36’ single-sheathed boxcars.
As best I can recall, their intention was to make the cars prototypical in a manner that would accommodate all of the various Fowler cars that were built, not only by the CPR, but by all roads which copied (to some degree) the originals.
To that end, they sent blueprints and a list of specifications on the materials to be used for making the changeable dies.
(I did see a pre-production model of one car at a now-long-gone hobbyshop in St. Catharines, Ontario), and was immediately impressed enough to begin saving, in order to buy dozens of them.
Some time later, the finished dies were en route from the West coast (and perhaps from
Sure…the improvised ones are those which don’t represent wooden doors - all of the ones shown with wooden half-doors were done with the NERS doors, labelled as The Standard Car Company, in Wells River Vermont.
The steel C&O boxcar, from Train Miniature, has half-doors created by slicing-up a stock of excess TM X-29 type doors that I had on-hand.
It was likewise with the SH&D Furniture boxcar (with decals from a friend).
The Michigan Central automobile car, also from Train Miniature, was built to match one in a photo of a prototype in one of Ted Culotta’s books.
I’m trying to think where the doors are from, as they’re more nicely-done (detail-wise) than are most earlier offerings from Athearn, MDC, and TM.
Not surprisingly, none of my door-and-a-half boxcars (there are more somewhere) have working doors.
Wayne