Hi all,
A current excursion into a limited HO adventure has caused me to dig deep through some old boxes of my model railroading gear from when I was a youngster in the late 80s/early 90s. Most of the little that is left is what you’d expect to find in the box of a 10-14 year old; lots of the cheap stuff only really worth saving if you plan on modeling a junk yard. But there was one set of passenger cars that I wouldn’t mind resurrecting, if for no other reason than they were a Christmas gift from my grandfather, the person by far most responsible for getting me hooked on model railroading. I thought to upgrade the poorly molded trucks, add some metal wheel sets with wipers, install some basic lighting, and maybe add some minor detail work here and there to spruce them up.
The problem is, I can’t really find anything about this product line or a truck conversion chart that even mentions them. As the title of the post says, they’re Life-Like’s SceneMaster line of “Old Passenger Cars”, which had two-axle trucks and talgo horn-hook couplers, with the trucks mounted with a plastic pin. I have a six car PRR set; RPO/baggage, a sleeper, 3 coaches, and an observation car. I had thought of picking up a set of Walther’s #920-2112 PRR 2-axle trucks and building up a bolster for them as needed on the underbody, and then do the same for some body-mounted Kadee couplers.
I don’t have any picture of the cars in question handy, but here’s a current eBay listing for the same line of passenger cars for referecne:
