Home Page › Forums › Modeling the Missouri Pacific, Texas & Pacific, etc › Mopac or Texas & Pacific layouts › I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011 › Reply To: I’ve bit the bullet, Jan. 15, 2011
This weekend I decided to start boxing freight cars. About five years ago, some time after I started buying RTR freight cars, I thought it would be a good idea to start hanging on to the boxes, since I knew we’d eventually move and many of these boxes started having nice plastic inserts that would protect the cars much better than being in foam carriers. My guess is that the Kadee boxes were the first ones I regularly kept.
Organizing stuff has never been a high priority for me, so I pretty much had a ‘box pile’. After packing all weekend, I have pretty much reduced the box pile to just some odd leftovers. The Kadee box pile is separate, so that’ll be a project for another weekend. The irony is that Kadee boxcars survived just fine in the foam car carriers, while the Branchline paint (mostly) suffered horribly from adhesion to the foam. But there are no Branchline boxes, since I built all those from kits. I think I have some suitable liner material, that I’ll try.
My goal is that, every time we drive to Wichita a load of crap, er, valuable stuff goes with us. The railroad stuff definitely needs to start being in that mix, and my wife promised me I could stack cartons of freight cars in the front room so I’m taking her up on it.
There were a number of cars I found that had some kind of oversize plastic couplers, so as I found them they came downstairs and got Kadee 58s. I keep stashes of Kadees painted boxcar red and rust color, and new Kadees have blackened springs so a black car gets those out of the package. Usually I use the 58 with the bronze sheet spring for the replacements, but they might get whisker couplers if the bronze spring doesn’t work well enough. While all of my cars get uncoupling levers when they’re built new, for these I skipped that step so they’ll probably have to take another trip to the bench some time in the future. Bear in mind I model an era before it was required to have coupler castings bare for better UT examination.
The main reason I’m clearing cars off the railroad is so I can do more trackwork and subroadbed. While I have a plan for stuffing modules into a U-haul truck, it’s probably better not to go overboard on the scenery so I’m concentrating on finishing stuff that I think is reasonably sturdy. Time will tell if this is the right approach.
RG7
