New B&O Freight Cars

Greetings Blog Followers,

Several new pieces of rolling stock and diesel power arrived at the New York Central Layout this past week. Today we'll look at two B&O 40' Boxcars that have just been put into revenue service. The first car,  B&O Railway Express Agency boxcar #1900, is an older Roundhouse kit. The car came in bright an attractive blue and gold paint scheme. The car was built as per manufacturer's instructions with Kadee #5 couplers and Intermountain metal wheels. The car is now extremely free rolling.

 
The next car up is a B&O Sentinel Service 40' boxcar from the Athearn Ready to Run product line. The car is an attractive silver and blue with nice graphics the the sides. The car comes with knuckle couplers and metal wheels. Out of the box the car performed poorly with excessive wobble and very poor free rolling capabilities. In addition the factory installed coupler were too low and had excessive vertical play. After tuning the truck the car still rolled poorly and had the shakes. I removed the factory wheels and substituted Intermountain metal wheels which cure both problems. No more wobble and good free rolling. For the couplers I added a Kadee gray washer and bent the metal coupler cover up slightly to raise the height and eliminate the vertical play.

Here is a photo of the car out of the box.

    

For those unfamiliar with B&O's Sentinel Fast Freight Service this started on March 3, 1947 and was aimed at capturing the car load shipping market with expedited siding to siding service. The B&O also featured Time Saver Service aimed at the Less than Car Load shipper which began in 1950.

B&O GP30 6954 leads our two new boxcars to Terminal Yard

The cars have been dullcoted and are now in service

The small B&O transfer freight includes an Athearn BB caboose