Athearn Blue Box Baggage Cars

[WVrailfan]

I have been doing some simple kit bashing to upgrade the looks of some old Athearn baggage cars, to represent cars rebuilt by the C&O in the 1950s.

The cars are close on length, but the doors are too far apart to be C&O cars. However, the main spotting feature for these cars is the newer smooth doors with the rounded corner windows after the rebuild. A friend laser cut some doors for me and I think I can live with the spacing inaccuracy.

Simply replacing the doors makes a world of difference in the appearance of the cars. I did go a bit further and grafted the round roof from an Athearn round roof coach on one of the cars as the C&O had both round roof and clearstory roof cars.

I converted the cars to body mounted couplers, still need to add diaphragms and roof grabs.

JB

 

[Espeefan]

Looks good so far. Prototypically accurate head end cars are one of the most expensive parts of our hobby. Guess how I know. I have a mixture of accurate cars and stand ins. Nothing wrong with a stand in at all, and to be truthful, unless you're at a RPM meet or a C&O convention, most folks won't even notice. They'll just compliment you on your work. These "capture the essence" nicely.

 

[CambriaArea51]

It's hard to get accuracy with older stock, most of the time they made a car that fit most railroads but painted them for all roads. Like Allen said unless you're at a C&O convention most folks won't know the difference.

 

[Patrick]

They look good.

 

[Iron Horseman]

I have been doing some simple kit bashing to upgrade the looks of some old Athearn baggage cars, to represent cars rebuilt by the C&O in the 1950s.

They look really good to me. And like the other's have said unless you go around the super knowledgeable people at conventions and the like, no one (like me) would know the difference. And sometimes not even then. I had a kitbashed "stand in" cabbage that I took to a Santa Fe convention and it still got some pretty good attention.

 

[dave1905]

One thing that I did on my Athearn Heavyweight cars is add a styrene "fin" on the underside where the centersill would be. The Athearn cars just whack the centersill off at an abrupt angle in order to clear the trucks. Cutting a piece of .040 styrene to match the slope and gluing it on the centerline of the car to match the slope, visually make the centersill seem "solid" but still gives the trucks a wide latitude to swing.