Similar to my post above, I recently purchased an Altas O Western Maryland die-cast 2-bay hopper on eBay. It was lightly weathered with no box, but was offered at a very reasonable price so I couldn’t resist. I planned to give it the “3-rail scale” treatment.
Although this car came equipped with 3-rail trucks and couplers, it was already factory-drilled and tapped for Atlas’s own scale couplers and draft gear boxes. However, similar to my LNE PS-2 covered hopper 3RS conversion above, I wanted to use Kadees.
Since the holes in the Kadee coupler draft gear boxes don’t line up exactly with the pre-drilled Atlas holes, I drilled and tapped 2-56 holes to accept the Kadee boxes flush mounted with the car’s end sills. The main difference between this and the LNE covered hopper was this car has a die-cast under frame—not plastic like the LNE car—so drilling and tapping was just slightly more difficult.
As for the 3-rail trucks, I simply removed the claw coupler (one screw hold them on) and then flipped the trucks around so the 3-rail coupler mounting “tabs” faced inward. There was enough truck swivel clearance so the tabs didn’t need to be removed like the LNE car above. Easy!
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 Kadee-compatible shims from Micro Mark.
I’ll finish up the weathering sometime down the road. Here are a few “how I did it” photos. The Kadees were already installed at this point. Thanks for checking it out. Hope you find it useful!
