Easy Boxcar Upgrades

Greetings All,

My recent coal hoppers and engines stored serviceable blog post was partially inspired by this photo from St Paul MN taken in 1977. After viewing that photo several times I hit my boxcar boxes to see if I had any boxcars left with easy opening doors that could benefit by having their floors painted. After a thorough search I came up with eight Athearn BB cars and three Life Like cars from the purgatory box for this project.

I did a similar Beat the Heat boxcar project in August 2016. 

Here's an Athearn BB NYC Early Bird Service 40' boxcar sandwiched between a couple of other BB offerings that still had the factory gloss black floor.

The string of BB cars from the 40' boxcars box to be upgraded in this project.

This SRC car was purchased at the Strasburg Hobby shop during one of our family vacations to Strasburg where we stayed at the Red Caboose Motel. I even have a Red Caboose caboose from that trip!

Here we are in the disassembly phase of the project. I used a marker to ID each cars floor to keep track of what car it came from as I would be dealing with eight floors. I'll be using Krylon rattle can paint called satin leather boots to spray the top of the floors. The markings will be covered by the weights.

With the car floors now rattle can painted and the cars reassembled this is a good time to give the cars an inspection that includes a trip to the Kadee height Gauge. Note this car uses Kadee #27 under set shank couplers and it lines up perfectly.

This BB DL&W 40'er was converted to knuckle couplers many many moons ago. It is now upgraded with Kadee #27s. Note the two red fiber washers per bolster and one per coupler box that were needed to get the car to the right height with the standard shank EZ mate couplers. 

This 50' BB Alaska RR boxcar has traveled a long way to get to Terminal Yard! It's going to be traveling a long way empty back home showing it's newly painted floor unless it gets pulled for loading somewhere along the way.

These three ATSF 40' boxcars are from Life Like and represent the last of the boxcars from the purgatory box. A PC video with new ATSF boxcars similar to these being set out for pick up gave these cars new life. They've received Kadee #5s and Intermountain 33"wheels. 

I've painted the visible metal weights with rattle can gray primer and these cars are now ready for service. The cars are now very free rolling and add some needed foreign road boxcars to the mix.

This pair of BB cars were Bruced up by having their trucks painted with flat brown rattle can paint. That's not a typo. Fellow modeler John Bruce turned me onto this trick of of using the brown body color for the trucks. Just put some old wheels into the trucks and spray away. It's that easy and looks great. Thanks John!

Total upgraded car count for this project is eleven. Eight BB cars and three LL cars. From watching videos and looking at photos of the late 1960's and mid 1970's the open door empties were alive and well in many trains of this period. Remember to avoid per diem charges those foreign road empties need to get off the system by midnight.

Oh yeah! What about those stored serviceable empty coal hoppers and engines at North Side Yard? Per diem is the reason they're still there as the PC doesn't need them right now and does not want to pay the daily charges for having them on their property. But stay tuned something's in the works that will hopefully get these cars back into revenue service. I'll cover that in my next blog entry. 

Thanks for reading!!!!