Passenger Car Rescue / Osgood-Bradley New Haven Coaches

Greetings All,

Passenger Car Rescue

Osgood-Bradley New Haven Coaches

A pair of used and in need of help E&B Valley HO scale New Haven Railroad passenger car kits purchased earlier this summer for $6.00 have gone thru the NYCTL Shops and emerged ready for revenue service. 

Project Scope

The scope of this project was to fix the cars so they would run reliably in revenue service, look decent but not to turn them into prototypical replicas which would have been very hard since the kits were already built poorly with glue stains on various parts and broken trucks. Let's take a look at the models and prototype information.

Osgood Bradley

The Osgood Bradley Car Company manufactured railway passenger cars and streetcars in Worcester, Massachusetts. The company was founded in 1822 to manufacture stagecoaches and sleighs. The company's first railway passenger cars were built for the Boston and Worcester Railroad in 1835. During the American Civil War, the company produced gun carriages for the Union Army. Osgood Bradley was purchased by the Pullman Company in 1930.

"Car 1002, built 1900by Osgood Bradley, Worcester, Massachusetts Post Office Square" by Boston City Archives is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Worcester factory is popularly remembered as the manufacturer of the American Flyer streamlined passenger cars during the 1930s. Walter Dorwin Teague designed a rounded aircraft-style body for railway cars manufactured of Cor-Ten steel. These cars weighed 15 tons less than conventional heavyweight steel cars. It was hoped these attractive lightweight cars might encourage public use of rail transportation while offering improved economy to the railway companies. 

New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad purchased the first of these cars in 1934. Other purchasers included Boston and Maine Railroad, Bangor and Aroostook Railroad, Kansas City Southern Railway, Seaboard Air Line Railroad, St. Louis Southwestern Railway, and Lehigh Valley Railroad. 

A. C. Gilbert Company, with New Haven trains running past their factory, decided to produce models of this car for their American Flyer toy train sets. Thousands of these toys were produced from 1946 to 1958; and railfans used the name American Flyer to describe the streamlined cars made by Osgood Bradley.

Model Information

The two kits in the single box were in need of a lot of TLC and some additional parts to make them layout worthy. The parts included new Walthers passenger car trucks, weights, and making bolsters to attach the new trucks to the model.

The first of the coaches is ready for testing. The steps had to be shortened to allow for the trucks and couplers to swing enough to handle the 22'' and 24'' radius curves on the layout.

 The bottom view shows some underbody detail that was applied by a former owner. On the second car the detail parts were broken off the cars but included in the box.

Getting the trucks to attach to the coach was challenging and required some imagineering and some trial and error. This configuration of a 2-56 screw, 2-56 washer, #4 washer, 2-56 nut, #4 washer, 2-56 washer and two 2-56 nuts worked best. The 2-56 nut fit very nicely into the large hole in the Walthers trucks.

Four ounces of weight has been added to each coach. The NMRA weight for this car is seven ounces but that made the car feel way to heavy so I started with four ounces which seemed heavy enough.

Time for final assembly. I cut some cardboard strips from a Cheese Club box as the backside looked to be a pretty close color to the shades I saw on the New Haven 1959 blog site(see link below).

The cars are ready for further testing and revenue service. The "shades" do a good job hiding the glue marks on the windows.

In this post 1955 photo the American Flyer cars would be about twenty years old as the trailing coach is in the McGinnis scheme. Some of the American Flyer cars would receive similar McGinnis paint and would be conveyed to Penn Central in 1969.

Check out the Osgood Bradley American Flyer cars in action.

Final Thoughts and Comments