Flea Market Finds

 Greetings All,

Flea Market Finds

During an October visit to Queen of Hearts Antiques in Buford, Georgia I came across the Lindy's Trains booth and scored the following freight cars.

Getting The New Freight Cars Into Revenue Service

All freight cars from this purchase received basically the same treatments that included a blast of Testor's Dullcote, metal wheels with their faces painted either black or burnt umber where required, additional weight, Kadee couplers, confirmation of coupler heights meeting the Kadee gauge, painted trucks and underframes.

By keeping to the above minimum standards every locomotive and piece of rolling stock can couple up with each other for reliable operation and provide a somewhat uniform non toy like look for equipment that is running on the layout.

DT&I 50' Boxcar #13650

Accurail DT&I 50' double door boxcar with an A-Line track cleaning pad system installed. The DT&I is one of my favorite railroads and the track slider pads are the preferred track cleaning method for the layout so this was a nice surprise. The DT&I was also known as Henry Ford's Railroad and was later controlled by the PRR and PC. This was the most expensive purchase of the day, twelve dollars.

The DT&I 13650 is now in service. A strip of wood was added on each side of the slider pad that is painted black. This was necessary on a 50' car as the center of the car off tracks enough to allow the pad to get stuck in turnouts.

B&O 40' Boxcars

A pair of Athearn BB B&O 40' boxcars with metal wheels and EZ Mate knuckle couplers. Five dollars each.

The weights were already painted as well!

One B&O 466378 is now in service with Kadee #5s in lieu of the EZ-Mates. The other B&O 466378 headed to the Patti O Paint Shop for stripping and repainting. More on that later.

Union Pacific 50' RBL #451360

A Details West 50' UP RBL kit caught my eye during the box browsing. I like the detailed the paint job on this car and I thought it would be an interesting build since I don't recall ever building a model from this company. Purchase price: five dollars.

The UP 451360 enters revenue service. This was a tricky kit to build. Attaching the ladders with styrene cement and a small brush without marring the paint was a challenge that took a good amount of patience. The kit does not come with weights so I added about 3.5 ounces of weight using a metal weight from my weights box and 1/4 ounce stick on wheel weights. The black trucks were sprayed with gray primer and brake wheel and assembly were painted silver to match the prototype. 

American President Line Containers

As I was leaving the booth I saw a stack of APL 45' and 40' intermodal shipping containers that caught my eye and were a great find. I've been on the lookout for some since I added a five unit double stack well cars last year.

The APL containers were priced at one dollar each. I bought ten! The containers look to be Walthers products with some being painted and lettered by a prior owner using different numbers. They were in kit form and required adding the inter-box connectors from the sprue that held the container floor. There are a few of these IBCs still flying around the train room!

DIY/ZIM 40' Container

This Athearn DIY/ZIM 40' intermodal container was sitting next to the APL containers and looking sad when I started to leave with the APL containers so for a buck I added it to the haul. You can see these on the roads and rails today.

Stacking The APL Containers

The APL containers have been stacked in this configuration using the inter-box connectors from the container sprues or homemade IBCs using a 1:87 scale drain pipe from an IHC house kit.

The lower containers each received one ounce of weight using 1/4 ounce self stick wheel weights. Note the well car can only handle 40' containers in the well.

The arrangement of the 40'ers on the bottom and 45'ers on top is prototypical. BTW, the Union Pacific outsourced it's domestic intermodal business to the APL with a ten year agreement in the mid 1980s. The APL containers look right at home in the yellow well cars.

Last But Not Least

Remember the second B&O 40" boxcar mentioned above going to the Patti-O Paint Shop? Here it is still under the auspices of the paint shop for final touch ups of some overspray. 

The TH&B 3650 will join TH&B 3284 which is another Patti-O Paint Shop alumni.

Final Thoughts and Comments

I went to check out Lindy's Trains hoping to find an Athearn BB 40' boxcar that I could paint as the TH&B 3650. Although I did manage to come home with more than that I want to state for the record I used a lot of restraint and left some good stuff for other modelers.

The ten APL containers were the biggest and best score which filled out the previously empty five unit well car set.

Thanks for reading

See you soon