I am starting to purchase refrigerator cars, PFE and such, does anyone make them where you can open the roof hatches to receive the ice. I am starting to build Walther’s ice station.
You did not say in what scale you are modeling.
In N scale, I havce Intermountain and Athearn kits with ice hatches to be applied individually over actual hatch holes in nthe model roof. It appears they can be applied either open or closed. However there does not seem to be any working hinge that allows it to be opened and then closed and then opened again.
The Athearn HO-scale blue-box kits come with hatches you can position as desired. They also have latches that can be positioned as you like, even used as props to hold the hatches open at a 45-degree angle for “ventilator service.”
You could, I suppose, not glue the parts in place but rather leave them loose to position as you’d like. With these cars, though, I suspect the latches would fall off and get lost pretty quickly, and the hatches might disappear occasionally, too.
If you’re interested in beer reefers, Greenway Products (www.greenwayproducts.com) uses these cars as a base for their unique brewery-based reefers.
You can glue the hatches in place with rubber cement which can be removed easily without damage to either the part or the car and reapply at will. Rubber cement hold well when dry. I use it to hold double stack together so I can change them around.
I second the comments re difficulty keeping the hatches in place - glue likely required.
Looking at Athearn’s web site, I would say that unfortunately, these kits have succumbed to the RTR bandwagon and are going to be hard to find.
As blue box kits, they were not highly detailed, but still a nice way of building up a consist of reefers. I’ll miss them.
Accurail is still making ice-bunker reefer kits, but I don’t know if the hatches are separate pieces or molded on to the roof.
Musky,
Branchline reefer kits (Blueprint series, not sure about Yardmaster) have hatches that can be propped open at different levels.
Tom
red caboose,intermountan,westerfield,sunshine models all have mpdels that have poseable hatches.all of them make excellent models.