Dear Mike, I assembled at least one each of all of the Trainstuff cars, which is understandable since I designed them. As a company, we really were not era specific as we produced heavyweight passenger cars from the 20's as well as 60' waffle side boxcars released just that year. The resin castings were made of polyester poured into RTV molds. The metal parts were spin cast in black rubber molds with pewter or white RTV molds in zinc S1 alloy. The patterns were made by several S Scale friends, Stan Stokrocki, Dick Lind, Bill Boucher and Pat Conlin come to mind. At one point, we were releasing a new kit every 2 months. This way a new ad was needed for each issue of the S Gauge Herald and S Gaugian. At first we thought we were doing pretty good with runs about 100 kits. But, I became increasingly frustrated that our products were not injection molded styrene and I thought this was our greatest challenge to increasing the popularity of our scale. We had a joint offer with Jan Lorenzen of LocoMotive Workshop to produce S Scale injection molded 50' boxcars for Pickens Railroad. These were to be give aways to clients. They wanted the boxcars on a piece of flextrack (Swede Norlin of Tomalco had just come out with the code 100 track that year) on a oak base with a plexiglass case. We contacted several tooling and injection molding houses, but were unable to seal a deal. We were not interested in helping in a project using an HO car, so we backed out. A few months later, Wayne and Diane Pier offered to purchase Train Stuff and we were more than happy to sell. Don
On Jan 9, 2012, at 9:09 AM, Michael Ostertag wrote: > Has anyone assembled on of the Trainstuff boxcar kits.
