I just picked up an old Cox 40’ Box Car, Road number CN 555895, stock number 612082. This model was part of the Leisure Dynamics line, of Ontario. The box is pristine and the car has little track time, based on the wear of the wheels.
My question is this: before I begin to modify it to run on my railroad, i.e., body mounted Kadees, Proto2K wheels and extra weight, am I destroying something of value? I looked at Tony’s website and found the car in the Leisure Dynamics catalog, but it doesn’t indicate if this is a scarce item or not.
Does anybody know of a source (such as the Blaisdell / Urmston resource) that can help? Any experts in the audience?
It’s not that my craftsmanship is bad, but I don’t want to ruin a museum piece through modification, although I wouldn’t mind adding this car to my fleet. Any help or direction will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, Len S.
Len, although there are some individual collectors of various items in our hobby, there is no organized collecting aspect to HO outside of brass. For your Cox car to have any really significant value, you would have to happen upon some rare individual who, for some reason known only to himself, collects Cox. Neither is there much outside of the Varney guide to indicate the rarity of any given HO item.
The only recognized true “museum pieces” in HO that I find immediately come to mind are the 1940’s PennLine Reading Crusader and a few pre-war Mantua and Varney locos. Outside of those, values are essentially in the mind of the potential buyer.
How true. The problem we all have is that the rare individual will not appear until after we’ve sliced, diced, and otherwise mutilated that model we thought had no value.
Look around on e-Bay and see if anyone is offering a similar item, and what it is fetching. I have an original Cox U.S. Army train set from the 1970’s which I don’t think is worth much at all over what I paid for it back then, because Model Power is selling the exact same items today.
Some of the Cox line were Athearn cars with different paint jobs and some were their own tooling. The Cox line eventually ended up as Walthers Trainline - low nose GP, and some others.