The Warped Tour

Athearn Stage (SFRC 56402)

For a long time I had no Santa Fe rolling stock in my fleet. I kind of held a grudge against the Santa Fe for merging the original TP&W out of existence. However, I eventually accepted the reality that if I wanted my TP&W trains to look realistic, they would have to have some Santa Fe cars in them. I was looking for a simple project after completing the east wall of the Legacy Building, so I decided to assemble one of the Santa Fe cars in my kit stash: an old Athearn Blue Box 57' mechanical reefer. Did it turn out to be a simple project? Well...

The underframe had quite a bow to it. Attaching this piece to the steel weight and the plastic floor should straighten it, except...

...the floor was grotesquely warped. I don't think I've ever seen an Athearn floor warped quite this badly.

I assembled the underbody and hoped that attaching the warped plastic parts to the steel weight would sufficiently straighten them out, but no luck. There shouldn't be daylight between the underframe and the floor, and as a result this car would have had drooping couplers. 

I cut a scrap of 1x2 to the same size as the pan in the top of the floor casting, drilled 7 pilot holes down the center of the floor, and then drove 7 wire nails through the underframe and floor into the wood. Attaching the floor and underframe to the wood block straightened them out nicely. I'm not sure I needed to bevel the top corners of the wood, but I thought this might make it easier to snap the floor assembly into the car body.

The wood block took the place of the steel weight. I was a little surprised that the wood actually weighed a bit more than the steel. Watch for my upcoming magazine article, "Weighting Your Freight Cars with Wood." (just kidding)

To match the rest of the car, I painted the brake wheel with a mix of 2 parts Vallejo Model Air 71.130 Orange Rust and 1 part 71.033 Yellow.

Here's the finished car. In addition to painting the brake wheel, I applied Vallejo Black Model Wash to the grills on the car sides to give them some depth, and I also painted the trucks and wheels. I sprayed the truck frames, wheel backs, and axles with Krylon Camouflage Brown. I brush painted the wheel faces with a mix of 2 parts Model Air 71.080 Rust and 1 part 71.130 Orange Rust. Now this car looks better than the rest of the fleet, so I guess I'll be slowly going back and painting the shiny trucks and wheels on my other cars. 

Roundhouse Stage (ATSF 50172)

After completing the reefer, I moved on to what looked like another simple Santa Fe kit, a Roundhouse (Model Die Casting) 50' plug door boxcar.

This kit has a single casting for the floor and underframe and has two pieces of steel for weights instead of one.

It doesn't show up well in the photo, but the plastic floor/underframe casting was both warped and twisted. Attaching the two steel weights wouldn't have done anything to straighten it out, so I found myself going back to the basement to cut another piece of 1x2.

I drilled holes in the bottom of the wood block to clear the plastic bosses on the top of the floor.

I used 5 #2 wood screws to attach the floor to the wood block. I don't have a countersink bit this small, so I used my knife to bevel the edges of the clearance holes in the plastic floor.

Here's the finished car. 2/2 with the wood block trick.

Walthers Stage (CB&Q 95279)

I bought a Walthers 54' GSC flat car kit at a train show way back in 2001, and my teenage self got really frustrated trying to assemble it because the plastic frame casting was warped. The plastic deck and thin steel weight didn't have enough stiffness to counteract the warp in the frame, and the parts kept popping apart when I tried to assemble them. I gave up on this car after several assembly attempts and it's just been sitting in its box until now. Fixing the warped parts on the two Santa Fe cars inspired me to revisit this warped flat car. As the old adage goes, "If at first you don't succeed...wait 22 years and then try again."

The car frame was warped such that the center was higher than the ends (concave down).

 

I couldn't use the wood block trick on a flat car for obvious reasons. I decided that what this car really needed was a backbone, so I bought a piece of 1/8" square steel rod at the hardware store. I notched the four cross members and trimmed the steel so it would fit inside the center sill of the car.

I glued the steel to the plastic frame with 5-minute epoxy and clamped it in place overnight with 3 small C-clamps and styrene spacers.

Now that's what I'm talking about. Compare this straight frame with the warped one in the first picture.

For improved aesthetics, I decided to replace the plastic deck included in the kit with a laser-cut wood deck from American Model Builders. I was prepared for the bitter irony of badly warped wood parts, but luckily for me they were flat.

The four end pieces fit perfectly, and I attached them with cyanoacrylate gel. The main deck piece was slightly too long, so I trimmed it at one end and then attached it to the steel weight with double-sided tape.

At long last, this Burlington flat car is on the active roster.