Hello- I’m building a couple of RPO (actually, mail-baggage) car kits and the instruction sheet only shows the arm on one side of the car. So are the arms oriented so that they “face” the same direction (that is oriented to face the same end of the car) or are they oriented to face opposite directions? The kits are Blue Line, from the 50’s, and they don’t give you a lot of information. Thanks for your help. -Richard W.
Hi, Richard.
The arms were removable and could be placed in the fixed brackets facing in either direction depending on the direction of travel of the car. The longer arm and opening would face forward to scoop the suspended mail bag into the hook. It would be manually removed by the postal cleck and the hook would be dropped down in the brackets to rest until needed next time. You may notice there were usually metal wear pads just forward and aft of the door used to hook the bags. These were to prevent the bags from damaging the sides of the cars when they were hooked. The bags had metal buckles and were quite heavy and this could mar the paint as well and dent & scratch the car. Sometimes they were painted the color of the car or a contrasting color or even stainless steel. just another neat detail for your RPOs.
I don’t know if they had 2 hooks on the car (left & right) or not as they were removable from the permanent brackets. I would think that maybe there would be 2 separate hooks in case someone accidentally dropped the hook when placing it in the brackets. Murphys law, you know!
The mail bag platform could be on either side of the trains direction of travel so the hook would have to be movable from side to side or rotated to face the bag.
I have several AHM (Rivarossi) RPOs and they have a hook on both sides as they came.My other RPOs usually only have one installed as the only hooks I’ve seen (HO) are made by Cal Scale and I have had a difficult time locating them so they have to be spread thinly. As I find more they usually get installed on the opposite sides of my cars.
Hope this helps you some!
Roger
Didn’t you ask this question on the General Discussion Forum too?