Browsing through old boxes of misc items for my HO collection and came across a few boxes of unbuilt Trains Minature kits, what ever happened to the Trains Miniature brand? The kits certainly appear to be on par with either Athearn or Roundhouse for the day.
Walther bought Train Miniature and produce that line for some time most of that line has been dropped by Walthers except the 25 ton crane.Now there was a line of camp cars to go with that 25 Ton crane. The crane and camp cars was first made by True Scale…
Brakie
Thank you for the information.
Knew that someone would know what happened to the brand. As luck would have it in my misc box there are a number of the MOW cars, are these the “camp cars” that you mentioned?
Would any one be able to speak to their quality? On par with Athearn or slightly above would be my guess.
This is my old True Scale MOW train. I bought it when I was a teenager, back in the 1960’s.
When I unboxed my trains 2 years ago after 40 years in the attic, this was the first set of cars that I upgraded to Kadees. I’ve put metal wheelsets on a couple of them, too, and since I took this picture I’ve heavily weathered a couple of the cars with Instant Rust.
These wouldn’t be called “craftsmen” kits, and wouldn’t be considered high quality by today’s standards, but they are reasonably nice castings which are fine as is, and which could easily be “dolled up” if you want to.
Actually the Train Minature and True Scale cars was in a class of their own…Could have been a little ahead of their time.
I’ve got a lot of Train Miniature boxcars on my layout. With a little up-grading (new wheels, Kadee couplers, re-weighting) they’re not bad. For detail, I’d put them a little ahead of the older Athearn BB, and just behind Accurail. Most of the boxcars are also lower profile, so they give a train variety in height. Occasionally I can find one at a swap-meet. They were one of the first manufacturers to offer the PFE wood reefer car with the WP logo. Pretty handsome little reefers. Still have about 4 or 5 of them, I mix them in with the Red Caboose WP’s and it gives my reefer trains a lot of character.
Nice little kits in their day.
Tom
Trains-Minature introduced these cars in the late 60’s. Some of the boxes listed the cars as part of their ‘Train-Master’ line. They had very good detail for the time. They even had a ‘car of the month’ feature where they did ‘special’ car on a limited run basis each month(IIRC, the BAR ‘potato’ car was the first one).
The big problem with T-M cars was the mixing/matching of ends/roofs and other details. This was not a big issue back then, but can be fustrating when trying to use one as the basis to start with when detailing.
At some point in the early 70’s, production slowed down and ended. They were reorganized or sold and came out again as Trains Miniature of Illinois. Again they slowly stopped producing cars and showed up as part of the Walthers line. After a couple of years, Walther started selectively dropping parts of the line. The 25 ton crane and s/s wook boxcar still show up in the catalog(like the ‘grain door’ boxcar).
Jim Bernier
Before we praise these too highly. they have problems as Jim pointed out. At least one (I don’t remember which) is a total foobie- no such cars existed. The PRR X29 which Walthers still sells is a mess. They used the underframe of the reefer so the truck centers and the entire underbody is totally incorrect.Almost all the paint schemes were foobies. In todays market they would not stand a chance - Maybe why they are long gone.
Actually they was very nice cars in their day and could still be used today by those that isn’t overly concern about models being 110% correct.
As far as the under body I prefer to operate my trains with the body side up and not the underside up.[:D]
I have to agree with Larry on this. 
The Train Miniature cars are my favourites for upgrading and redetailing.
Except for PRR 52860, which is from Red Caboose, all of these cars are by Train Miniature. All cars were painted with Floquil paints, and weathered using both Floquil and PollyScale paints. Lettering on the B&A, CCC&StL, and MCRR cars is Champ decals, while all others were done using dry transfers from C-D-S.
Wayne