Which is the.....


Maxitrains

Maxitrains

Member
...best brand to purchase, as for rolling stock, I would like to buy some detailed boxcars and maybe some tankcars.

I would also like suggestions on how to recognise boxcars and tanks cars which were used in the 40's to 60's era.

Which other cars could I fit in a normal layout ( with no industries ), having just depots and a warehouse?
 
Which car is best, a Land Rover or a Ferrari? :) It's a hard question to answer. If you're talking about details as being best, Kadee and Accurail kits are hard to beat. If you want nice looking cars that run well out of the box, Athearn, Atlas, and the newer Bachmann cars are a good deal, with good detail but not to the level of Kadee or Accurail.

Boxcars in the 40's to 60's era always have one distinguishing detail - roof walks. They started to remove roofwalks and side ladders from box cars in the 70's, even on existing boxcars. IN addition. about the longest length was 50 feet and none of them were high clearance. although many were all steel, there were still a lot of wood side with steel end boxcars left in the 60's and many all wood boxcars with vertical brake staffs in the 40's through the late 50's.

Tanks cars in the 40' and 50's were almost 100% single dome oil and gasoline cars. There were a few special use tank cars for things like acid but single dome oil and gasoline cars made up the vast majority of tank cars in service. This all changed in 60's as oil and gas pipelines were laid all across America and the railroads lost oil of their oil and gas traffic. By the late 60's you only saw specialty tanks cars carrying materials that didn't go in pipelines, mostly caustic chemicals that were difficult to transport by truck.

Just about any kind of freight car would be fine in a train under the assumption that it's running through to some other place. Unit trains of refrigerator cars were a common sight traveling from California to the east carrying fruit in the winter. Coal trains were and still are common passing through regions that didn't mine or use coal but were on their way to factories and power plants. There's really very few types of freight cars that would look out of place on a model railroad.
 
In order to point you to some of the higher quality stuff, it might help to know what scale we're talking about.
 
Phillip, Maxi runs HO scale. Maybe we should all put our scale in our tagline so we don't confuse one another. I think I'll change that now.
 
Sorry about that, yeah I run HO scale, and I would like to start buying some boxcars that fit my layout location (USA) and era (40's - 60's), since the only ones I have are much less detailed and European.

So box cars like these are of the era I'm building? it seems they have ladder and walkway!!!

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BTW thanks for the TAG hint Jim.
 
Low end stuff which is very nice is Athearn , Roundhouse , And Bachman Silver !! Good stuff and nicely detalied for the price .
 
I'd suggest Athearn. Very versatile, and not that bad on prices. Especially with you buying on eBay.
 
How about Accurail and Atlas, I found a source on e-bay selling both and prices range from around US $ 10.00 to US $ 25.00

What would you suggest, I don't even know the actual prices of how much cars like these normally go, as I already said we have no such hobby shops here.

I'm still trying to find a good power seller on e-bay which has all the range I need, from buildings to vehicles, people, freight cars, locos, etc well mostly everything that could be needed on a layout, and that ships world wide, with reasonable prices.

Thanks for the help given so far.
 
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Maxi,
Any of those cars you posted would be fine on a 40's to 60's layout although you have to narrow things down a bit. For example, the first two cars would have still been in use in the 60's but the plug door Maine Central car wouldn't have come into use until the very late 60's.

It looks like the first two are Accurail kits and the Maine Central is an Athearn or Roundhouse kit. You can see the main differences between the two types of kits. The first two have separate ladders and grab irons and the details, like the roofwalks and stirrup steps, are finer. The last car has the ladders and grab irons molded on, the stirrup steps are thicker, and the roofwalk is also thicker than scale. Now, how much of this would you notice five feet away? Practically none unless you got an old Tyco or AHM Car where everything was two or three times out of proportion for scale.

Since you are wanting to build up a freight car fleet, I suspect your money will be rapidly depleted by buying Accurail. Atlas Trainman cars are a good deal for the money but I will go with Paul and Josh's suggestions. Try for some of the older Athearn "Blue Box" (so called because they come in a blue box :) ) kits as your first choice. It's often possible to find sellers on e-bay who are letting them go in the $5-$8 range and they look and run good. I'm not a great fan of the old Roundhouse line of freight cars but there are some that are unique that only Roundhouse built. With some care, they will also be nice rolling stock, and they can also be found at very reasonable prices on e-bay. Save the big money for special kits that you want to use as foreground detail or where Accurail is the only make of the model you want. I would guess that 80% of my freight car fleet is Athearn Blue Boxes. I'm slowly replacing these with Accurail, Kadee, Branchline, and Atlas freight cars but I expect this process will take several year because of budget and the amount of time it takes to build each kit.

A real nice compromise if you can find them are 4 pack Yardmaster kits from Branchline. The details are molded on but they are very fine and they assemble almost as fast as an Athearn BB kit. I just got a 4 pack of NKP 40 foot boxcars from e-bay for $27 so keep an eye out for those.
 
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