@Don McErlean posted:HA! Carpetrainman - you forgot to mention the number of the police car in the foreground...who can forget..."Car 54-where are you ?" from early TV. Dennis, from looking at the roofs of all those box cars, several of them appear to be older O'gauge wooden kits that you assembled, painted, and decaled then bought trucks and couplers for. These would have been popular (yes I built 1 or 2) in the 1950's. Is that correct? Did you build them?
Don
Don, you are correct, wood and metal kits from Walthers, Scale Craft, Lobaugh, Westbrook, All Nation, Athearn and a few others fromt he 1930's to the 50's. I picked them all up over time, most of them in bad shape as basket cases etc. I've spent some time matching up period correct and mfr correct parts for a lot of them, so more I am rebuilding or putting them back on the rails. Trying to keep the better ones as original as I can if that makes sense. That said, I do have a stach of kits and more projects as well lol. I love tank cars so I have a bunch of those in various stages of rebuilding. These I taken beaters completely apart and rebuilt the frames so far. It's a lot easier on the early versions with bronze end platforms. The later Walthers tankers had the famous Walthers lead/solder alloy stuff that is a pain to work with. Much prefer these early Walthers Creestline style tank cars lol. This Walthers Texaco is a good example of the projects I like to find.
