Roundhouse brand (N scale)


railfan

junk collector
Is anyone familiar with a brand of rolling stock called Roundhouse? Their items look good in photos.....but I've never seen any in person. I'm wondering how long roundhouse has been in business? Perhaps they are a spin-off of another more well known model company? Any info/opinions would help.


Mike
 
Roundhouse was part of Model Die Casting.The whole thing is part of Athearn (Horizon) now.They started out as simple kits much like the old Athearn Blur box HO kits .

Any kits you find now are going to be NOS as the kitsre no longer being made.
The cars a rather decent though some seem to be imagineard as they are not quite prototypical.
 
Plan on changing out the MDC couplers. They don't want to stay coupled with each other or other brands of knuckle couplers.

Glenn
 
Is anyone familiar with a brand of rolling stock called Roundhouse? Their items look good in photos.....but I've never seen any in person. I'm wondering how long roundhouse has been in business? Perhaps they are a spin-off of another more well known model company? Any info/opinions would help.

Mike



Hi Mike,
The majority of HO cars and Loco's I have, about 65? are Roundhouse.
Model Die Casting initially produced Engine kits and a few car kits and was based in Hawthorne, Calif. a couple of doors down from a shop my Dad had. I was actually there back in the early fifties as I recall.

Their kits are very nice and easy to assemble and used to be available for around $5.00 to $7.00 for the Old Time Box Cars & Reefers had a body length of 36.5' and their Shorty Coaches were 35' over all frame length, in both cases not counting couplers. Their Delrin trucks are very free rolling but all kits came with the dreaded horn hook couplers and needed to be changed out but Kadee #5's fit right in the draft boxes perfectly and I changed all mine out to begin with.

Most all the cars came with either a die cast metal base that the plastic shell fit onto snugly which sometimes required a slight bit of filing to clean them up but that was half the fun. If the cars didn't have a metal base, such as the cabooses they always included metal weights that went between the plastic base and the under side of the cast body to bring them up to the proper weight as did the Old Time coaches as I remember.


I don't recall that they ever made any N scale kits though or even made any finished cars?

I do know Kadee has a line of Micro cars though and you probably know of others.

Hope this helps,
 
Thanks David and everyone. I have a source for a bunch of used roundhouse N scale railcars. Might try some out.


Mike
 
I think their good cars. I have a lot of them. Probably around 75 or so. All of them I upgraded to Micro-trains trucks and couplers.
 
Say Mike,
I did finally find that there were N scale cars brought out under the name Roundhouse this must have been something Athearn did after acquiring MDC as I don't remember them earlier but then again I never paid too much attention other than HO gauge stuff.
 
In case anyone is interested....here is a link to the guy from whom I've ordered most of my collection.....beginning in january 2012. His name is Dave.......a one man operation offering only N scale......mostly used gear in good condition.....some bargains can usually be found.

https://yardsaletrains.com/products.php?cat=61&pg=10

Lower down this page there are a bunch of roundhouse items.....more in the rolling stock categories......plus all the other usual atlas, kato, microtrains, intermountain, many others.

Whenever I've placed order before noon on a weekday....he always shipped same day.......free shipping on orders of about $90 or more.....so far this has been my experience. Great N scale train source.


Mike
 
Say Mike,
I did finally find that there were N scale cars brought out under the name Roundhouse this must have been something Athearn did after acquiring MDC as I don't remember them earlier but then again I never paid too much attention other than HO gauge stuff.

Roundhouse offered N scale for many years before being bought up by Horizon. I toured the factory in Nevada back in the 1990's when they were making N kits. Somewhere I still have the N passenger car the owner gave me at the time.
 



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