Bob, I'm glad you got this train. I was watching it while it was for sale, because it really is the same set - right down to the two flat cars in one box! I think you got an incredible deal - mine aren't close to mint like yours. It really is quite a set of big black cars, there isn't anything else quite like it.
Bob Thon of Roberts Lines was my source for the decals to put on the tank car, and also for the black hopper car which he built and painted and decaled for me. I had known Bob from the Challenger project, and I ran into him at the Clayton train show one September way up in northern NY state, so that's how I arranged for the hopper.
Bob is using hopper bodies made by Dwayne Eberhart, so they are essentially the Forney hopper, which Eberhart now makes, and then Bob mounts them on his Roberts Lines frames and trucks to make the Roberts Lines hopper car. He volunteered to make one up for me and paint it black even though he had not previously done them in black, and it all happened pretty quickly so apparently he has the parts on hand.
The tank car is a little harder to come by, there weren't that many made and they were all painted blue and silver. So in a sense I was lucky to find one, and then even luckier that it was badly water damaged, rusty, and the soldered seam of the tank had let go... so it justified repainting in black, which otherwise I would not have felt okay doing. Arno told me that there were only 15 of the Roberts Lines tank cars made. I think the tank car is a difficult, time consuming, and expensive car for the small manufacturers to make: CMT only made a few of theirs also, I think for the same reasons.
At the Clayton show, Bob was selling Roberts Lines cars with G-scale trucks on them for the garden train crowd; he seems to have found a niche market that is a little bigger than us standard gauge folks. I actually got a different, low-sided black flat car from him that wasn't in the original black set, and I swapped out the G scale trucks for SG... so The Black Train keeps growing. But strictly speaking, you have the complete Black Train set, the others have just been one-off add-ons.
I was a little concerned about hurting Bob's feelings with painting the tank car black, but he's very enthusiastic, he was glad to send the big white decals to go on it. But he did say he is running out of those, and they are getting old and brittle, don't know how many more he might have. He is putting more "realistic" road-name lettering on the G-scale cars now.
Really glad you got this set, and a train this size will look great stretching its legs on your big SGMA layouts!
david
WOW, what a pretty choo-choo 
. I have a few questions. I will email you, if I may?
