Thanks for the kind words, Gary. Here's another rebuilt car, this one from Proto1000, a 36' Fowler Patent Car. When these cars were first released, they were retailing for around $35.00, too rich for my tastes, especially since I "needed" lots of 'em. New England Rail Service was working on a kit of the same car, and the projected price was $24.00, so I opted to wait for that release. Well, that one's still tied up in litigation and that money tree in my backyard
still isn't coming through with a "cash crop", but fortunately for me, LifeLike came to the rescue. It seems that the initial run of these cars were lettered incorrectly, omitting most of the dimensional data. LifeLike sent out a number of new body shells for these cars, available as a no-cost trade for the incorrect bodies bought earlier. The LHS offered the old, traded-in bodies at $2.49 each. There were only six left the day that I happened to drop by, so I bought them all. Even though this was a car that I had waited years for someone to produce, (CNR and CPR owned thousands of these cars, a must for any Canadian modeller), the one thing, besides the price, that had deterred me from buying these cars was the plastic grabirons, which, in my opinion, are much too heavy. So, my first task was to remove them, fill in the resultant holes with styrene rod, drill new,smaller holes, then fabricate new wire grabs (these are an odd size, so commercial grabirons wouldn't fit. Thirty-six grabirons (per car) later, I was starting to believe remarks made by others about my sanity
. However, undaunted, I also replaced each of the six plastic dropsteps (per car) with metal parts, along with the plastic handbrake staff. Referring to prototype drawings in the June 1985 issue of Mainline Modeler, I also realized that the models' roofwalks were short by 6" on either end. New ones were fabricated from strip styrene and scratchbuilt wire corner grabs were added on the new lateral roofwalks, eliminating the last of the oversize details. While I still hadn't spent much more than the original fifteen bucks for the body shells, I still had only body shells. (I had also removed the factory lettering, which seemed impervious to any of my time-tested methods, by carefully scraping the lettering with a chisel blade in an Xacto.)
Anyway, I splurged on six pairs of Proto Simplex trucks, correct for these cars, and fabricated a simple floor and underframe from sheet and strip styrene. Some K brake cylinders from Walthers 50' singlesheathed automobile cars (another bargain find), along with some scratchbuilt levers and brass wire rodding, and some Kadee couplers completed the construction. The cars were relettered with dry transfers from C-D-S: two TH&B, two CNR, and two CPR, one of them lettered for CP subsidiary Montreal & Atlantic, the car pictured below.
Wayne
