Yes, I'd known that Jim King had done the wagontop in urethane, although where
there have been such productions, the kits have not been inexpensive. Urethane
limited-runs tend to be larger than brass (and accordingly cheaper) but not so
great as to afford economies of scale;
probably S scale may be the ideal match with urethane kits, as the numbers are
large enough to justify creating the master and doing the handwork of molding.
And I wasn't thinking of the SHS announcement about the fishbelly side twin
hoppers as N&W, although that surely will work. They are a good addition to
standard freight car types in S scale; Don is careful to choose types not
already well-represented but relatively common. I was aware of the LV
wagontops and ribsides, but as I mentioned in discussing O scale offerings,
wood or card never quite makes satisfactory steel models. POSSIBLY fabricated
styrene.
I suspect most of us who've gotten into S scale in recent years have missed the
Train Stuff line, coming across occasional fragments of it at shows.
Jace Kahn
General Manager
Ceres & Canisteo RR Co./Champlain County Traction Co.
> Of the cars you mention, several have been available in non-brass versions in
> S. The MILW ribsided cars and B&O Wagon top boxcar have been (and I think
> still are) available from Lehigh Valley Models as wood and card kits. One
> version of the N&W hopper was made by Kinsman. The X-29 was offered as an
> epoxy cast kit by @#$% Trainstuff under Wayne Pier. More recently, Jim King
> offered the B&O round roof car as resin kit, with more accurate detail than
> the old Custom Brass version, and S Helper is doing the N&W hopper in plastic.
> Pieter E. Roos
>
> > My long-standing thesis is that there are at least a
> > half-dozen distinctive prototype freight cars which were
> > routinely interchanged during the steam/early diesel era so
> > many of us favor, and that a serious modeler of that period
> > ought to have at least one each: MILW ribside, B&O
> > wagontop, PRR X29, N&W peak-end twin hopper, and, of
> > course, the GLca (others would occur to me if I thought a
> > bit longer). A much shorter list than the long-running
> > series Ted Culotta has done in RMC, but probably sufficient
> > for smaller operations.
> >
> > As I was suggesting, these were hard enough to find in O
> > scale: ribsides were made in kit form many years ago by
> > Lobaugh and Graceline (embossed card sides) and more
> > recently in urethane bodies by Ted Schnepf; Ted also has
> > released a wagontop in urethane and Weaver is promising a
> > mass-market one later this year (years ago Walthers and
> > Lobaugh offered wood kits for a slightly different class);
> > FINALLY Atlas paired with Middle Division to produce
> > mass-market models of the X-29 and H-21 (Walthers had a wood
> > and lead casting kit many years ago, and Des Plaines offered
> > a very limited run of urethane kits for the former).
> > IMP imported both the N&W hopper and a wagontop from
> > Japan in the 1950's, but both need work to look right, and
> > Ambroid/QC offered a nice wood and whitemetal kit (actually
> > also offered in S scale--I was able to buy one at Duluth),
> > and many, many years ago RailCraft had a semi-kit produced
> > in Missouri. That's it. Everything else for
> > these very common cars, even in O scale, means expensive and
> > often hard to find brass.
> >
> > The reason I have taken so much band-width is really not
> > unrelated to S scale; if these are so hard find in O
> > scale--which is what, ten times the market of S scale?
> > Twenty times? Fifty times? Some of these have
> > been offered in S but so far as I can tell, all as brass
> > imports. One cannot blame the manufacturers when the
> > market is still so small. If S scale were my primary
> > interest, life would be even more difficult if I had to find
> > examples of these very common prototypes for a
> > representative railroad model. I guess I'm glad I
> > don't, and I really don't have a good solution to this
> > problem, just stating what I see as a problem.
> >
> > And closing the circle on this, I'd agree that serious PRR
> > modelers would want at least a few GLa's, but I'm not so
> > sure the rest of us feel the same sense of urgency.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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