I found this at a flea market mixed in with a pile of low-end tinplate Marx and battered old Flyer. It’s an S scale boxcar made mostly from ABS plastic sheet. The workmanship is excellent and precise. It’s very square and tight. The roof is either a single bent piece or two pieces fitted precisely together, with no support underneath…despite that, it’s almost perfectly straight and parallel. The doors operate and they’re built up from 14 separate pieces of plastic. The corrugated ends are precisely cut from thick ABS with a very good finish, but enough small differences to show that they were made individually. The end details are separately applied from ABS sheet and Plastruct shapes.
Both sides are painted blue, and the paint is sprayed on so smoothly I thought at first it was just blue plastic. The ends and roof are unpainted ABS. One side only is decorated for Ann Arbor with what appear to be CDS dry transfers. The only commercial parts are a pair of American Flyer talgo-style trucks, brake reservoir and cylinder, and one ladder. All the weld lines are scribed, and the only roof detail is scribed lines, but again, all very straight and square and parallel.
But for all the trouble someone went through to make this, they made some odd choices. The stirrup steps are solid, cut out as part of the wall pieces (which are quite thick, .060 laminated to .030 I think). The underframe is blocky and simple, just some cut out crossbraces of the same gray plastic and a pair of strips to form a center sill. And then of course there are the colors: blue and gray, with lettering that as far as I know was usually used on normal boxcar-red cars. The trucks aren’t screwed on, they’re affixed by glued-in kingpins of turned white plastic.
It’s all very strange, and the only sense I can make of it is that it’s a manufacturer’s prototype or photo mockup of some kind.