I purchased an Altas O Lehigh & New England 2-bay covered hopper at a small tran show in Gardner, MA last month. It was the body only—no trucks or couplers…but for only $5, I couldn’t pass it up. I knew right away that I would give it the “3-rail scale” treatment.
The car was already factory-drilled and tapped for Atlas’s own scale couplers and draft gear boxes; however, I wanted to use Kadees. As many of you probably know, the holes in the Kadee coupler draft gear boxes don’t line up exactly with the pre-drilled Atlas holes, so I drilled and tapped 2-56 holes to accept the Kadee boxes flush mounted with the car’s end sills.
I grabbed a pair of brand new Atlas Barber-Bettendorf style trucks from my parts stash. These are the newer Atlas trucks with the thinner-profile (closer to scale) side frames.
Most 3-rail trucks require some modifications to work properly with the body-mounted Kadee box, and these were no different. I removed the claw coupler...and then needed to remove the 3-rail coupler mounting “tab”. That was the most difficult part of a relatively easy conversion.
After mounting the trucks, I used my Kadee coupler height gauge to determine the number of shims needed to lower the coupler box to the proper height. I use the Kadee-compatible shims from Micro Mark.
Side note: I forgot just how detailed these hoppers are…they are really nice!! Of course they’ll be weathered sometime down the road? For about $32 total—and an hour’s worth of time—I now have a really nice scale freight car.
Here are some “how I did it” photos. The Kadees were already installed at this point. Thanks for checking it out. Hope you find it useful!
