Chester Industrial Arts Passenger cars

I have a few of these unbuilt kits in O. Only Walthers seems to have deigned to provide trucks for their cars, and they are sorely missed .

Well, you are looking at All Nation bronze trucks with Lobaugh bolsters and good old .172 steel wheels.  In my opinion, the trucks are the best part.  Folks who use nails to attach sides . . .

Bob is not a Chester Fan, but I am; though agree the use of tacks to secure the metal sides to composite kits yields a REALLY bad look for the resulting car. Thanks for posting the ads, instruction and photos. The Chesters are pretty plain jane but can be made into nice cars. Restoring them after they've been beaten up with tacks and bends is quite tedious though; taking the dimples out of the soft roll-stamped aluminum sides is not fun either. They are 17/64 too so there's that... but I again like them for what they are. Opinion , the overall look can be improved to respectable with the addition of end plates, a cut liner (I use matte pebble board) and suitable details like under-body parts, hand rails, and roof fixtures. Replacing some of the doors with better shaped window versions helps too, especially with the head cars.  The line appears to be loosely based on pre-war PS plans. I'm currently bashing up a set of five to approximate a late model T&NO Sunbeam in its last year of operation after the parlor had been dropped.

Pete

Hello Bob thank you for the ID on the trucks ......  those are scale tacks being used so it's ok 

Pete ...some folks just don't appreciate brevity in construction habits .........they are a bit bigger than the Walthers' cars ... but not as big as the Kemtron .....

I like the cars as they are,  another small maker trying to offer a passenger car line in the turmoil period of growing HO market ,  declining   O scale , and did scale S gauge ever get rolling ? 

Chester was filling the void of Kaisner who seems to have gone with the HO market ( the smart money) after their fire of 1950 . 

Please post some photos of your Chester train when you are done with it or construction shots of the the upgrades .

Cheers Carey

Pete is correct - I will not be competing with you for Chester cars.  When I was a kid the advertisements were too good to be true: a dollar ninety eight for a gorgeous shiny streamliner.  I don't know how I resisted - I guess at that price I figured I would be disappointed.

Like the 3-rail crowd, I operate here on nostalgia: a corrugated or smooth streamline car, to fit in around my place, has to be extruded aluminum.  I do not even have any Kemtron cars, although I have a six car UP streamliner.

I remember lusting over those Lionel extrusions, anodize and silhouettes and undersize domes and all.