One of the great things about this hobby is that if you get tired of working one one thing there are always all sorts of other aspects of the hobby to dive into. Case in point.
I bought this very low cost Tyco Bulkhead Flatcar off EBay a few weeks ago knowing that there would be some modifications.
First step was to disassemble it so I could see what I had to work with. The car also came with a “lumber load” but it was way, way out of scale. The boards were a scale 18’ wide and nearly 6" thick. They gotta go.
Much of my rolling stock is used stuff from my LHS or even from garage sales. Even with new cars, kits or r-t-r, modifications are normal practice.
This is an Athearn Blue Box 50’ flatcar…
I removed the original plastic deck along with the floor (an integral part of the deck) and the underframe. Because I no long scratchbuild using wood, I decided to use-up the stripwood which I still had on-hand, to create a new deck. The bulkhead ends are from a Walthers kit for a 53’ GSC flatcar.
I built simple bolsters from sheet styrene onto which the trucks could be mounted, allowing the car to ride more prototypically lower, then modified the endsills to allow proper coupler height.
The underside of the car shows why the frame was removed…
…so that even empty, the car, at 6.5oz. tracks well.
I generally paint the decks on plastic cars, like this Walthers GSC flatcar…
…but could have replaced the stock deck with pre-painted strip styrene, as I did on this loading dock…
The advantage of styrene over wood is that it can be installed using solvent-type cement, whereas the best choice for affixing wood to styrene is contact cement.
SInce you can still click the links and get the same thing, I suspect the original source location was only a temporary file name. Sort of like BEFORE Photobucket changed and people would sometiems just post the URL that appeared in their browser while viewing their photo, instead of the actual link provided in the box next to the picture.
We can see it. If you are using the picture icon, the link has to end in some sort of picture extension like .jpg .bmp .png or the like. Google photos don’t usually have those extensions
JohnnyB might be new here but he intuitively knew enough to create a title for a posting that was all but guaranteed to draw Dr Wayne into the mix - well done!
Mantua/Tyco did create more than a few plastic car bodies that are excellent fodder for modification and improvement. Somebody in their tool and die area knew what they were doing, and perhaps dispaired at the what the paint and lettering department routinely did to their creations.
Most of my rolling stock is low cost stuff that I’ve rebuilt. That involves turning down flanges if needed, converting to Kadee couplers and adjusting coupler height, ensuring the trucks are adjusted to pivot correctly. Sometimes they need new wheels and trucks. As long as they function well. Looks are secondary.
On my pike, the Athearn BB pieces are the good stuff. I only own four high end cars. They’re beautiful and they roll extremely well, but you get 1.5x performance at 5x the price.
As always, YMMV but when it comes to old cheap tyco train cars - it’s your call.
My ex-wife had an old Tyco train set from her childhood and told me I could do what I wanted with it. The box car had a molded on roof walk, it had talgo trucks and other deficiencies which made Athearn blue box cars look like fine scale models. In the end, I could couldn’t see how I could work a miracle to turn that pigs ear into a silk purse. Maybe I am just not made of the right stuff but I could see it was futile for me to even try. Kudo’s to those with the chops to do it and have it turn out to be a visually good looking model. It’s not for the faint of heart like I was/am.
Here’s a Tyco reefer with a moulded-on roofwalk and moulded-on hatch detail, too…
…with the original paint (possibly applied with a roller) removed, and an airbrush application of better paint and some metal grabirons and sill steps, it’s a bit more acceptable…
However, the floors on these cars took on a bit of a sag (I’d already re-trucked them with Athearn trucks and had added body-mounted Kadees), and I decided to build new underbodies.
While I pondered the best way to go about that, it occurred to me that a wood-sided refrigerator car in the '30s would be unlikely to have the steel dreadnaught ends that were on these four cars, so I decided to address that, too…
I also had three LifeLike wood-sided refrigerator cars which had similar shortcomings, although they were already 36’-ers. I had previously dressed them up a bit, with body-mounted Kadees and better trucks, but decided that they could look better still…
a good photo of a similar car,