I am not suggesting that any member of this forum needs help assembling an Athearn Blue Box kit. I would like to present the basic improvements I make when assembling one of these so that the finished product will provide years of reliable service on my STRATTON & GILLETTE railroad.
There are still hundreds, maybe thousands, of Athearn unbuilt blue box kits to be had for reasonable prices everywhee I look. To make it even better, Bev-Bel and others custom painted these into plenty of awesome paint schemes that have never been avilable anywhere else. I’ll bet we all have at least ten of these things stashed away somewhere, so, there might be plenty of good reasons for us to still be putting these kits together.
Model Railroader has published a few articles through the years on improving Athearn Blue Box kits, but these mostly has to do with external detail improvements, not reliability and running quality. I am not going to make any modifications to the exterior of this car. I just want to get it on the rails and have it run as well as any other freight car in my fleet.
I only operate with freelanced roadnames, so there is not much in the Athearn line of decorated kits I can use, but there have been some released in the NMRA collector Heritage and Living Legends lines that are suitable.
There are also three kits from the Heritage line that I have detailed and brought up to SGRR standards, GORRE & DAPHETID, DELTA LINES, and SUNSET VALLEY NAVIGATION. These three kits were not Athearn Blue Box and came with seperate details.
Most of the NMRA collector models made on Athearn kits with molded on ladders and grabs. Redetailing these represent a bit more work than I want to do, as such, the Athearn kits just get assembled and run for fun. The kit for this project is NMRA Living Legends #3, a 40 foot steel boxcar for Milt Moore’s GIBRALTAR RAILROAD.
I have quite a few Athearn box cars and never had one with bowed doors. Also the spring steel coupler covers can be bent in at the open sides to give a a tighter snap fit…all mine are original from the mid-50’s and on. One of the features of them that I liked was in fact the sliding doors. A lot of mine have interiors with workers unloading the car. When in the train you can slide the door closed, when spotted open the door and there is the load with workers in it. They also have the original trucks, with a little tuning work fine. Most of My fleet of freight cars have the original trucks…not a problem at all…if you keep your track clean. For 2.95 to 3.95 a kit…that was the greatest bang for the buck anywhere:
Door closed in train/door open for unloading:
The workers sure have their work cut out for them…bags of flour…on the floor.
Yes, if you follow my method, the doors will not longer operate.
The upper door guide on these cars is a seperate piece that is installed at the factory. I think on later cars is when they started causing troubles. The doors will barely slide even if they are properly installed, and they do tend to bow outward sometimes.
I could probably fix the problem with the door guides if I investigated it, but none of my resin cars have operating doors, so I do not feel the loss.
My Standards for rolling stock aren’t as high as some people. As long as it runs, dosen’t derail, and the couplers are at almost the right hight, than it’s good enough for me.
For me I prefer the weights as close to the truck as possible, it aids the car in tracking properly.
Also, since the doors are non-operating after your surgery, I would remove the claws on the door for the bottom door track, it is not prototypical, you could also use replacement doors from a number of suppliers, many times the undec Branchline, Atlas, IMRC, Red Caboose come with many sets of doors for you to use to properly replicate your prototype, I have a couple of hundred extra doors that I can use for replacements.
Well, mine may look like more, but I’d have to say that the work done is probably more cosmetic than for operational improvements. I do install Kadee couplers on all cars before they go on the layout, but usually, no other modifications are needed for the cars to run well, and I usually don’t bother with metal wheels.
The upgrading process is not only fairly involved, but is also interspersed with a lot of other shake-the-box kit “improvements”. If you have time, and/or are curious, here’s a LINK to the whole shebang. The particular Athearn car to which I’m referring is first shown in the eighth photo on the first page of the thread, but it’s some pages later where that particular step-by-step gets underway. It is rather involved, I think.
Why is the steel weight a problem? And the stock amount of weight is plenty, once you add the metal trucks.
I paint the weights, bend the coupler covers so they work (as others have suggested, so I don’t think I’m alone there), I cut off the truck nubs, file the bolsters as needed and install Kadee self centering trucks, that have been refitted with Intermountain wheel sets (yes this is my over the top thing).
Sometimes I will replace the molded steps with A-Line steps…
And we are off, to the paint shop for some light weathering, usually very light.
I have nearly 100 Athearn blue box piggyback cars alone. They do have some other cosmetic mods.
But I have never lost a coupler cover yet…and 50 car trains with them perform flawlessly.
I’m sure I have every bit of 200 blue box boxcars set up as described above, I’m not about to invest that kind of time…not broke, not getting fixed.
Once in a while I would have to straighten a warped floor, especially with their 55 foot covered hoppers.
After ensuring the floor is straight and level, I secure the steel weight to the floor by melting the holding pads onto the top of the weight with an old soldering iron. The whole structure is more rigid when the OEM weight is affixed permanently to the floor.
The metal coupler covers can be splayed a bit to not hurt the nubbies that hold them on. Scraping off the nubbies is what causes the covers to fall off. Once equipped with KDs, there wasn’t much reason to take them off.
I don’t pay too much attention to underside detail. My layouts are usually only about 50 inches high which prevents me from seeing much of the underside. Kind of a moot point for me to inspect it just for the sake of comparing it to the real thing.
I thought I was doing a pretty good job of bringing Athearn BB kits up to par but my efforts pale in comparison to what you do. I replace the wheels with Intermountains, adjust the weight to NMRA recommended practices, install Kadee # 148s and get the coupler height correct, but that is about it. I have never had a warped door and I do prefer to have the doors operational. Eventually I will get around to adding loads and figures in some of them.
Please understand that I am not suggesting that what you are doing is going overboard. I’m pretty sure you get a lot of satisfaction from doing the modifications just like many of us do when we are detailing a BB car. Your work is to be admired!
On the trucks aspect, I have been just switching the wheelsets to metal, Intermountains in most cases. So I do not cut off the “truck nub” cyinder on the bolster that keeps the truck centered.
I typically find, on several brand HO kits, that the nubs are a bit too long to allow the truck screw to adjust the wobble of the truck properly. When too long, both trucks have excessive wobble, as the screw tightens against the nub before beginning to tighten the truck adequately to preclude excessive wobble. So I invariably file the nubs somewhat shorter before even testing the trucks wobble, leaving plenty of nub, of course, to keep the truck centered. If I guess wrong and have excess wobble when the trucks are initially added, I just remove the truck and file the nub a bit more.
I’ve found if I pinch the metal clip a bit, the draft gear coupler box has no issues coming open, although i’ve never cared for the design and because of that and other reasons, I rarely if ever buy Athearn blue box kits anymore.
I’ve been assembling Athearn BB kits for over 40 years and never felt compelled to go to such lengths as described by the OP in this topic, especially as better models have come on the market during the last 20 years.
My minimal work for a fairly reliable Athearn car (what few I have left) is to:
file the bolster down so I can snug one truck so it swivels but doesn’t rock.
Add Kadee fiber washers to make sure the coupler height matches my Kadee height guage.
Adjust wheels as necessary to fit the NMRA Mark IV guage.
Do a few basic things and the car will operate quite well.
But I’ve found for basic low detail kits, I prefer Accurail anymore for the few I buy and occasionally I do. Everyone has different standards and ways they use their hobby time of course.
I’d also include removing both the upper and lower door tracks - they’re both oversize, and the bottom one sits too high (which likely contributed to lots of us building loading docks that are also too high). You can use replacement doors or segment the Athearn doors and splice-in parts from surplus Athearn doors. A lot of improvements like that are included in the link which I provided earlier.
If you want working doors, but with close-to-scale doortracks, use the system that the Front Range cars used, with a guide rod cemented to the inside of the door, running inside of a channel cemented to the inside of the car - I used the same method on these Red Caboose X-29s…
…and on a number of these Walthers 50’ automobile cars…
I also found this Ertl r-t-r USRA doublesheathed boxcar at a train show. It came with working doors, and cost only a couple of bucks…
I do things a little differently. I am OK with the stock steel weight, the Athearn coupler boxes and the Athearn trucks and wheels. I do check all 4 wheelsets for gauge, using the NMRA gauge. The trucks come out of the box in gloss black plastic. I paint them with red auto primer, Krylon or Rustoleum rattle can. I brush paint the wheel faces grimy black. Then I wrap the whole car in 2 inch masking tape and spray paint the undercarriage dark gray auto primer. Although the undercarriage isn’t really visible on the layout, the paint does prevent the odd glimpse of a bright steel weight by onlookers.
I always check the coupler height after the car is together. Since I use the Athearn coupler boxes, the coupler height always comes out low. A pair of #6 flat washers under the trucks will bring the car up to proper height. And I always bend the sheet metal coupler box covers for a tighter fit. Long nose pliers are all I need for that. In the past I have had some coupler box lids pop off with amusing consiquences, but not the ones I bent for a little more tightness. If needed I file the sides of the coupler box to make the lids fit more tightly.
Nie work on your fleet, Kevin. The ol’ bb freight cars ,despite their inaccuracies have a well earned place on our layouts. Well, mine for sure. I’m probably going to go back and do a couple of your improvements on my fleet.
Metal wheels and Kadees as well as proper weight are standards on my cars. I don’t bother with detail that can’t be seen when cars are on the tracks.
Steel weights don’t interfere with my own magnetic uncoupling system. Dan
