It's been a while since this post was active but I've made a few further mods to the Lionel O27 closed auto carriers.
One of the easiest fixes was how to camouflage the edges of the roof where the "ears" were removed. As it turns out nearly all of the roofs on these cars are either white or silver. I found some 1/8" wide pin striping in both white and silver at my local O-Reilly auto parts store:
That was a big help as the roof edges are exactly 1/8" thick and the colors of the pin stripe match the roof colors perfectly. After applying the pin stripe along the entire length of the roof edge I rolled over it with a paperhanger's seam roller to really secure the tape. That solved the roof issues.
I also bought a roll of PRISMA pinstripe to place on the bottom edge of some of the cars if desired. It is 1/4" wide (same as the car bottom edge) and has a neat reflective quality that can be a poor man's conspicuity striping like some rail cars have. Some cars have both ends of the bottom edge left blank without any script like that shown on the green Katy car. That's a good place to apply this reflective tape. Or you could just 45 degree angle cut the edges and add some short lengths just where desired.
Secondly I wasn't satisfied with the look of the recessed ladders so I had a second go at them. The fix was to highlight the rungs and sides of the ladders with a fine point black magic marker prior to gluing them to the recessed car sides:
Since the ladder pieces are molded in the same color as the car when glued in the recess you get a sort-of 3-D effect. Pretty convincing to the eye.
After this fix the car doors were essentially non-opening but that's OK by me. You can't see any autos loaded inside of these cars anyway.
Thirdly I decided to use the holes in the lower edge of the car ends to add some stirrups. I used some 1/4" wide staples that I cut down in length, bent to the desired size and glued them into the frame with hot glue:
You can see the stirrups stuck in the glue here:
Lastly I thought about adding weight to these cars like I did with the open Lionel O27 auto racks in another post. I didn't use the stick-on wheel weights with these closed cars as they were too thick and were visible from the car sides. So I stuck with the fender washers that I applied originally in two pairs of 2 each:
The cars ride steady and don't wobble with theses weight attached as they have a good weight to them with a low center of gravity:
None of these mods will ever be a replacement for a scale sized auto rack but at 68' in S scale length these cars are about the longest you can easily run on R20 curves without taking out track side scenery or lantern housings on turnouts.
Best of all they are cheap (like me) if you search for them second hand at train shows.
Mark
