Sometimes you just have to go back for more of some things.

Right after the Stewart triple hopper was introduced in about 1995, I bought several and lettered them with the then-new Oddballs decals. This hopper was probably the dominant open-top hopper of its day, before being superceded by the outside-stake hopper that was easier to repair after corrosion. MoPac had a couple thousand of these cars, most of which were dead-on for the Stewart car. I had a need for some open-top hoppers for central Kansas, not so much for coal (probably what they were really built for), but for gravel, chat, ballast and other stuff. Stewart actually produced a six-pack factored lettered in the Eagles scheme, which I passed up at the time in favor of decal lettering. At least the paint was pretty easy to match, since until 1961 these cars were plain black.

Spring forward twenty years, and the average level of model detailing has gone up. The Stewart car has molded-on grabs and a crude brake gear, but the proportions are right and most of the molded-on detail is actually pretty good. Stewart went on to make open-top hoppers in quite a few other body styles, which meant a lot more to coal-country modelers than to me. But, I started to come across more of these cars on eBay, so I picked up a few already lettered ones. Frankly, the buzzsaw and the Eagles stencil are pretty good even today, though the reporting marks and some of the smaller lettering aren’t that great. But, I decided to throw together a few.

The model needs a trainline, which goes on the right side (the air reservoir side). I use 1-1/4″ brass rod, and the ends of the trainline just disappear up behind the body bolster. It’s attached with four eyebolts. The slopesheet supports are also missing, but I used a piece of 1/16″ angle glued to the weight to simulate part of this. I did not attach the actual braces, which should tie back into the frame halfway between the body bolster and the end.

Stewart provided a pair of 70-ton five-spring A3 style trucks, but their molding looked odd to me so I didn’t use that truck. Instead, I used the Kato 50-ton A3 truck under the original cars. Now there are a couple of good 70-ton A3 trucks from Exactrail, Tangent, and maybe one other, so I used those. And I used the Kadee scale-head couplers with whisker spring instead of the earlier Kadees. Assembly time for each car might have been an hour or so. I hit the trucks with black paint, and of course had to paint the weights and the trainline.

The models were numbered in the 61000 series (61000-61999), built mid-1949 so they were some of the first cars to get the Eagle slogan. One of the cars had a duplicate number, so I carefully scraped it off, which didn’t leave a major scar. Next I’ll add some repaint data to a couple of the cars, and some weathering. For now I’ve stuck these cars on the layout, and once again I have a cut of hopper cars in which about half are the MoPac triples.

Ron Merrick