Given that much of the Wabash traffic along the Buffalo Division was for auto plants, it's no surprise that a few autocars will be required.
This car is one of a few styles of 50' autocars the Wabash had built over the years and it is easily recreated using a Sunshine Mini-Kit and a Proto 2K kit.
The Proto kits can be found on Ebay and the Mini-kits are usually available at shows where Sunshine is present.
The Mini-kit consists of resin cast Superior doors, side sill reinforcement, tack boards, door locks and decals. The modeler has to supply the 50' car kit.
Personally I find most of the supplied details from Proto to be too coarse for my tastes. So I've replaced the ladders, bracket grabs, drop grabs, AB brake components, hand brake, brake step, cut lever, etc.
The mounting holes in the car body were plugged with styrene rod and puttied as needed.
You can also see in the left hand corner the ladders. They are photo-etched stiles with preformed grabs for rungs. I'm really loving how the ladders turn out.
The layout of the brake components follows convention. Nothing too fancy. A-Line stirrups are mounted as well.
Bracket grabs are from Kadee. These are the best bracket grabs I've seen. And they're cast in a rubber like compound, which means they can take some handling without breaking.
The end is detailed again following normal convention with a photo to help.
3 comments:
You're going to need a lot of DT&I and WAB cars to cover that traffic; here's a list of some actual cars used in Eastbound Ford parts service in June 1954:
http://dti.railfan.net/Equipment_Database/TrainConsists/BlackRockFord54/BlackRockFord54BuffaloCars.html
Nice work as always Pierre - and the 50-foot cars will add a nice contrast to the many 40-footers on the layout.
Cheers!
Thanks for posting this, Pierre. It was a big help while building my model using this mini kit. Steve Solombrino
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