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Walthers HO AT&SF heavyweight chair car
I like them as much as I did the Budd Cars. Also based on a SF Engineer friend tells me, get the black roof verison which is more accurate for SF.
It appears to be an authentic model. I did not see a chair rail below the windows, which was a unique characteristic of ATSF heavy weight cars
It would also be nice to bring cars of this quality out in other road names and undecorated as no everyone models Santa Fe.
I read this review in the magazine and it inspired me to purchase the car. My dealer only had the silver roof version (not prototypical in stock) but the reviewers comments about all the added roof detail and needing to spray the roof when he was done made me realize that the roof color didn’t matter since I would need to paint it any way. Also, as a note, these chair cars lasted fairly late – the is a photo of one in McCall’s book on the AT&SF Doodlebugs being pulled by the M-190 on the Carlsbad-Clovis run. And while the minimum radius is in keeping with the amount of underbody detail but if you were to cheat, you could cut away some of the underbody that wouldn’t be seen and probably get the car around a 22-in radius (550mm for our metric friends) with no problem. This is a beautiful model and harkens back to the days when Walthers produced their old wood-and-metal kits of Santa Fe heavyweight cars. Kudos to Walthers for this model! Matt Coleman
Oops! Wouldn’t it be nice if we could >have
Gentlemen It’s a great model of high quality and offers some variety in passenger car models in the future. Regards