Figure 4
Freight Car Setup For Club Ops – by Joe Brugger
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oming up with the right mix of freight cars for operations can be tricky. Busy, operating layouts can be hard on rolling stock. Steel coil cars stand out in a train, and my club layout, the Columbia, Cascade & Western, needs a half-dozen to feed a steel fabricator. A number of vendors have made coil steel cars over the years. Walthers produced a 55’ Evans coil steel car back in the days of white cardboard
box kits. The same model was later sold ready-to-run in Walthers’ Gold Line. When an unbuilt kit for C&O 306501 turned up (cheap) at my local hobby shop, home it went. The stenciled build date is 1-77, so it fit right in. My club has standards for appearance, weight, rolling quality and couplers. Here’s how I meet those standards. I start by replacing the kit’s plastic wheels with metal wheels after cleaning up the truck bearing surfaces with The Tool. With a cotton swab, dab a bit of powdered graphite into the side frames so the car will roll down a standard grade. Atlas, Kadee, Proto 2000 or Intermountain wheels work. Install Kadee #148 standard-head, metalwhisker couplers and check the height of the coupler head and curved metal trip
pin. The “A” end of the car was a little low, so a red fiber washer now rides between the truck and the bolster. The coupler box lid and pivot were drilled and 2/56 screws inserted to keep the lid from popping off under strain. The CC&W will have some long 2% grades when the railroad is complete. A 2/56 screw is pretty big; most cars with snap-on coupler lids can be fixed with 1/72 screws. Mark the center of the pivot post with a pin before drilling a hole for the screw. Sill steps on the kit measured about 6” thick so I nipped them off and drilled the side sill for metal A-Line #29000 Style A stirrup steps. They have a finer cross-section and will be more durable. No more broken stirrup steps!
Figure 1: With new wire side sill steps, a light coat of weathering, and some fine tuning, a 20-yearold Walthers steel coil car kit is ready to operate. Somewhere between my workbench and the club, a stacking bracket went missing. I’ll need to make a replacement from styrene shapes. Figure 2: Frank A. Phillips Jr. photographed a prototype car from the same class in the late 1970s in Alexandria, Va. (Photo from RR Picture Archives, used with permission). Figure 3: A 2/56 screw ensures the coupler box lid stays in place. A-Line wire side sill steps replace the plastic originals. A light coat of thinned Roof Brown PollyScale tones down the dark blue underframe. Figure 4: A black fine-point Sharpie or a dab of paint will tone down the jarring shiny screw tip protruding through the coupler pivot. A better solution would be a smaller screw that doesn’t go all the way through the housing.
Figure 1 Page 44 • Issue 11-08 • Aug 2011
• The Car Shop - Freight Car Setup for Club Ops, page 1
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