I’m becoming convinced that this is new body tooling, or at least one never before used in a final production model. I have found no matching shells on anything in the world of O scale.
Here’s some more pure speculation. Maybe the missing louvers that always are a part of the sides of F units landed the tools for these shells in storage for later modifications, only to be abandoned after the manufacturer withdrew from our hobby. (I can see forgotten tools from the last days of K-Line, whose tooling ended up in the Sanda Kan factory’s possession as a partial debt settlement following MDK Inc.’s bankruptcy. That tooling ultimately mostly ended up in the hands of Kader, which bought the troubled Sanda Kan facility shortly thereafter. Kader has been rumored as a tooling source for Menards for years.)
I don’t know. Total guesses.
