Seeing I’m waiting on parts for my project, I decided to work on other things. One thing that has plagued me from the get-go is “what to do with old cheap freight cars”. The cars in qeustion are life-like ,bachmann and so on.
I have an old life-like Linde industral gases forty foot box car.All my freight cars have Kadee couplers and I’d hate to cut this car up for a scrap load as so many other cars have meant their demise. I started by cutting off the couplers from the trucks,used the trusty dremel to sand down the box car frame for the coupler pockets. Glued on new coupler pockets and installed , Kadee couplers on this now useful freight car.
Now all I have to do is figure out which freight cars should be re-shopped and which should meet their scrapped fate ? I don’t own all that many cheap freight cars,I much prefer the top of the line freight cars.
Speaking of re-shopped freight cars , I once re-shopped two AHM six axle heavy duty flatcars like the Linde car. Coupler pockets,Kadees …the whole nine yards. So if you have a fleet of old cheap freight cars and would like to re-shop them…it’s not that hard.
It is a pretty rare car that cannot be readily equipped and improved with better trucks and body mounted kadee couplers, and perhaps replaced steps made of metal or plastic and better brake wheels. Having said that some older cars have such poor paint jobs – either non prototype, or colors are false, or the paint is thick and shiny, or small lettering that is smudged or filled in, that when you are all done with your effort, do you really have a car you want to run? Actually some Bachmann and AHM trainset level cars are or were pretty decent cars – good quality casting, clean and accurate paint jobs. My AHM Atlantic & Danville 40’ box car, whcih AHM made after long lobbying by a one time well known modeler named Adolf W Arnold, is a collector’s item and they did a nice nice job on the lettering. The Bachmann short hi cube box is another good casting and the UP paint looks good. Ditto an AHM Reading gondola. Others of course are close to junk, such as a Marx trainset CBQ hopper…
Other than whether I need another example of a given kind of car or not (I have enough reefers for example and need no more), I base this kind of decision on such things as the quality of the casting and the paint job, then consider whether the car has NMRA standard weight or can be made to meet the weight standards (flats and gons being the big challenge), then whether the bolsters will readily accept the better quality trucks (some bolsters such as the old Mantua kit cars will only accept Mantua trucks, being a totally proprietary design), then whether there is good space for the coupler pocket. If it is house car (Box car or reefer) I prefer to screw the coupler pocket in place by the way rather than rely on glue. Once you know what your glue joints look like after a quarter century you lean these things …
What I paid for the car does not really enter into the equation provided it is a car that
Nearly all of my cars have been upgraded over the years. I’ve fitted Kadees, swapped out the plastic wheelsets for metal ones, and in some cases I added additional weight. There are some cars that I don’t mess around with though. If it’s something that will never run right, it goes into the parts box. Maybe I can reuse the frame, trucks, or other parts on another car. Whatever’s left eventually finds its way into the scrapyard on the layout.
If you’re modeling Warbonnet country, you can put old Santa Fe cars in (large) back yards, farmyards, behind businesses or just about any place that someone could use one for storage. Apparently the Santa Fe sold outdated cars to anyone who’d haul them off the property.
My favorite is an old covered hopper which is mounted on stilts, used by a cattle rancher to store feed for his stock. It’s just south of Interstate 40, visible for miles.
Long ago, and far away, I accumuated hundreds of freight cars, mostly hoppers, from IHC or someone like that for a little over a buck apiece. They have oversized wheel flanges on plastic wheels and those X whatever couplers. I usually ran them coupled together in long haul freight drags, so there was never any switching. Current prices vary from $7.50 (on sales) up to the mid thirties. SO, I have little choice to build the roster I desire than to replace the trucks and couplers. I will still be far below current prices, and they will look great behind a consist of 4 NH EF-1s dragging them up from the Hudson River docks. Am I cheap, no just FRUGAL.