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The “current” paint scheme on Athearn’s forthcoming run of HO TankTrain cars hasn’t been available from the firm before. It doesn’t have any TankTrain logo at all. The drawing in Athearn’s .pdf announcement posted at athearn.com a few days ago, when enlarged very substantially, shows that the early body car was tested in 2003 and the late body car in 2010.
The “early” (1977, with two big TankTrain logos per side, one orange and one white) and “late” (1982, with one small TankTrain logo per side) will be repeats of the models in the first run, with the same car numbers and order numbers.
The ten or twelve TankTrain cars I saw at the Canadian Pacific yard near the former site of the Delaware & Hudson’s Colonie shops in New York State this May were still wearing the 1982 paint scheme.
I have three of the early cars in the billboard scheme and like them very much. They’re beautifully detailed and even with the “corrugated” hoses (used to transfer the petroleum product from one full-sized car to the next) installed, they run okay on 18" radius curves.
I also like Athearn’s forthcoming run of 50-foot flatcars that carry 40-foot trailers – except that they don’t include the hinged “bridge plates” that allowed trailers to be loaded and unloaded “circus style”, which was common practice when the real cars were used. Walthers used to offer a set of suitable bridge plates in styrene; I wished that firm would start selling them again. The livery worn by the CN trailer almost surely dates from before that railway’s “wet noodle” logo was introduced in 1961.
I failed to catch a typo in my earlier post. Athearn’s .pdf announcement of the TankTrain cars in the “current” paint scheme shows the “early body” car as having been tested in 2008, not 2003. I apologize for my error.