@CNJ #1601 posted: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!
How many Micromark shims did you need for the Kadee coupler boxes to do L&NE hopper thanks