Thanks to the recent publication of the ART book, I now have been preparing to build out the fleet.

First is the ART 35000 series, one of three small groups of cars that were the next built after the square-corner prototype of the MPHS/ARM model. For purposes of brevity, I’ll refer to this as the ‘ART model’ here.

These cars had round-corner ends, still 4-4 dreadnought. This end has been available in a couple of forms before, first as a white plastic molding from, I think, Detail Associates, but they were wider than they should have been, probably made to fit an Athearn reefer. Later the late Stan Rydarowicz made some in resin, which were improved in dimensions, and that’s what I used. These were still about .030 or so too wide to fit the ART model, but a bit of careful filing took care of that. The modifications to the ART kit I started with were basically to file the ends back to eliminate the rivet strip, and cut out the floor molding end details, keeping the draft gear box. On the prototype, the boundary between yellow and red was still at the intersection of side and end, but that put the rivet strip on the red side now. On the model, the resin end doesn’t have rivet detail on the edges, especially after the filing to shape, but that’s a compromise I accepted.

The resin ends had pre-drilled holes, which were mostly in the wrong place since I used the correct ladders and brake gear that were in the ART kit. I drilled and installed all the end components first, then gave the ends one last coat. My choice of paint? Scalecoat II PRR freight car red. After all the discussions about paint color, I decided this would be close enough, especially with a bit of weathering.

I’d assembled the underframe details and the roof details of the kit first, then after two ounces of weight glued to the floor, assembled the floor to the body and the roof to the body. Some trimming of the top of the ends was necessary to get the roof down properly. The side details, couplers and uncoupling levers were last. The distinctive ART guardrails at the sides of the hatches are a bit tricky, since they have no mounting holes. I had to carve the roof ribs down just a bit to get the rails to fit squarely, but that also gave me an additional gluing point.

Next up? I have several sets of 3-4 ends and diagonal-panel roofs from other IM models that are also useful for ART. But since I have at least one more set of the Rydarowicz ends, I can also do an SFRD Rr-33, which differed from an Rr-32 by exactly the same degree as the 35000 from their predecessors.

Ron Merrick

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