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Discussion in 'General' started by Boomer John, Sep 15, 2011.

  1. Boomer John

    Boomer John Member

    I think I've told this before on the site, but I can remember the first quality RTR boxcar I ever saw. Fun for All hobbies in Topeka got a shipment of a half dozen Kadee boxcars. I thought to myself, who is going to pay $30+ bucks for a boxcar. At that time I would say most of my modeling was Accurail and carving off grap irons, etc. I went overseas and left the hobby for about five years. When I returned and went to Doc's I was surprised, there were no kits, everything was RTR and $30+ bucks.

    I have been acquiring boxcars for my West Bottoms layout and just about have enough to return the lend lease cars I have from Rick M. I was looking for somthing to do last weekend and pulled an old unassembled Branchline 40 footer from the dead pile. I bought it at Destination Station in Lenexa, how long have they been gone, 10 years? It was a joy to put together, very well designed.

    I have acquired about ten kits for my Frisco fleet since nothing in Frisco is RTR. First up was a Kadee 40 ft PS1. The Branchline car was good, but this thing was fantastic the way they engineered it. Just a real kick to put it together.

    I don't know where I am going here except to comment are we too interested in acquiring, electronics, etc. I almost wish I had gone smaller, and my railroad is not that big, so I could spend more time modeling. How about a Westerfield kit, hum.
    I guess this is why I enjoy the work of Jim James when it come up.

    John
     
  2. Joseph Toth

    Joseph Toth Member

    I was born in Dallas, Texas, on the 4th of July 1946. At about four I got a Marx wind-up. At five a Lionel 027. In 1962 I sold it to make the big change to HO. All the teenage boys were doing this. So what if the Pennsy GP7 that was produced only one year became a collectable? I was in HO. I was in tall cotton!

    There are still a lot of Mom & Pop manufacturers producing kits. OK Engines still offers Herkimer aluminum passenger car kits. LaBelle and several other outfits catalog wood craftsman kits. Bowser may still have the "screwdriver" die cast steam locomotive kits on the market? With some work and brass castings you get a Frisco 2-8-0! There are even Z scale freight car kits on the market today! I can´t see them with my 65 year old eyes of course, but they can be found on the www.zscalemonster.com site!

    Why all the fuss about Sound? DCC? Silent roadbed? The old recordings with train sound effects worked, insulated rail joiners kept you on your toes playing train dispatcher and real trains make noise too when they run don´t they? Kits helped you work with tools, BandAid (Reg.U.S.Pat.Off.) was ready to apply First Aid to that finger you just cut off with your hobby knife...Athearn´s diesels with Hi-F Drive (translated Rubber Band) ran like no 20th Century Limited ever did! Atlas´ electrical system was fool proof and not expensive to replace if you did burn out a switch machine...I started in HO with the Athearn Hustler starter-set and MRC´s "king size box" power pack for less than $25.00 in 1962! It wasn´t modern high tech model railroading but it was still FUN! Atlas and Revell had some real neat structures to make my Railroad Empire come to life! Athearn´s yellow box kits were fun to build and inexpensive and the X2f coupler worked pretty good most of the time. And it was affordable on a Paper Boys wages!

    There weren´t many Frisco models on the HO market in 1962 but we had Champ and Walthers decals and spray cans! Walthers even offered a bunch of shortlines to letter those undec cars with! There was the Diesel Dress-Up kit to add "glass" and handrails to your Athearn F7 (all those broken drill bits...) and Athearn even offered a lighted cupola caboose that flickered when it operated over the shiney brass track! Lionel HO featured The Texas Special! It wasn´t anything near prototype standards but this Texas country boy who was raised on his grandparents chicken farm near Carrollton didn´t care. I added the Varney 40 foot double door Frisco boxcar to the roster along with the Revell SL-SF flat car with cable roll load and the Ulrich Frisco diecast hopper car too! MDC Roundhouse released a Katy 50 foot double door boxcar and it rolled marrily along behind those Texas Special FAs with pride!

    Looking back 50 years (Gads, has it been FIFTY YEARS?) I do so without regret. True, times have changed and there isn´t much a model railroader cannot obtain today and some still complain if a manufacturer doesn´t include Frisco in the newest diesel release. When they do, the nitpickers tear it apart like a baby chick did with a watermelon rine on that farm where I was raised.
    Are we REALLY better off now afterall?

    That´s for each member to decide on his own. For me, I miss the good old days! Of course, if I had Andre Ming´s talent...but that´s another story!

    Joe Toth
    The Trinity River Bottoms Boomer
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 16, 2011
  3. yardmaster

    yardmaster Administrator Staff Member Administrator Frisco.org Supporter

    John, good to hear from you. I have had similar thoughts many a time. I've determined that we'll never have enough rolling stock for the busy Northern Division layout in our realm.

    Jim James' work does make an extremely compelling case for modeling a small, low-density branch line.

    Best Regards,
     
  4. Boomer John

    Boomer John Member

    Chris:

    Thanks to Rick lending me some cars I've determined it takes about 30 cars to run my West Bottoms. I now have my fleet and will return to Rick the next time I see him. Let's see, at $25-$35 per car that comes up to......, let's not tell my wife.

    John
     
  5. MKfred55

    MKfred55 Mk junction Fred

    Z scale kits? Magnifier please. i do get my cars at my hobby shop friend for $5. $30 is for the good looking stuff which dont matter to me. Lets keep this hobby going.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
     
  6. mktjames

    mktjames Member

    At the TWMRC we had about 1000 freight cars and found they fouled the yards and staging. We have reduced the number to about 750 and reduced the train numbers from 60 to 40. Mike knows the number, for sure, but most of what we run are the Athearn blue box with metal wheels and kadees. The cars are durable for handeling. My comment on the modeling end is since there is not alot of Frisco accurate models as compared to ATSF and UP , most of my Frisco equipment is modified from other undec sources. I like to have the correct stuff , I have 12 Texas passenger trains for the DFW area, and they are about 95% correct . When I start a model I plan on it being 85% correct for the first go around, and super detail it to finish at 95%. What do others on the forum do with their projecting and in what time frame ? I do brass model painting and dcc, but am excluding them as they are pretty well modeled correctly to begin with. mktjames
     
  7. Joseph Toth

    Joseph Toth Member

    It is ironic that with the demise of the Athearn blue box kits, Z scale is offering kits! I agree with the price range. As nice and highly detailed the new freight car models are, the more detail, the more parts to get damaged while handling or running same. A friend of mine who lives in the Tampa Bay area has returned to model railroading and has a bunch of the Athearn cars that he runs on the Suncoast Model Railroad Club located in Largo, Florida. He mentioned that the higher price of the new highly detailed freight cars wasn´t the factor he declined to purchase them but the fact he has no home layout and has to transport the equipment to and from the operating sessions thus the fact the new generation of cars won´t take the rough handling without some micro part getting broken.

    Home layouts seem to be the place to operate the new generation of highly detailed freight cars. Though generic in design, the older metal cars from the dark ages of HO model trains, like Athearn, Model Die Casting, Varney, etc. weren´t confronted with this problem. Athearn and Varney´s metal cars had seperate details too, like ladders and grabirons. Of course, when I made the switch from Lionel 027 to HO, I built the Athearn yellow box plastic kits and a few of the other manufactuers cars that came decordated for the Frisco. A set of Lionel HO Texas Special FAs belonged to a friend of mine as did the passenger cars that Athearn produced for Lionel to go with their x-Hobbyline FAs. We didn´t care, we still had fun running the train!

    The Texas Special dome car was accepted as part of the train without a second thought if it was prototypical or not. I always thought the Texas Special should have included dome cars. The Ozark scenery of Missouri would have been a hit with passengers for sure and would have given the Mopac´s Eagles stiff competition for sure! Wonder if the dome car issue was brought up when the initial meetings were being conducted regarding the streamlining of the train? If so, cost might have played a roll in the final decision and selection of equipment to be used.

    At any rate, there still are not a lot of Frisco models on the market today in any of the scales from Z to G without having to be modified to become close to prototype Friscos. Taking this into consideration and the cost factor of current ready-to-run models, I still think the best way to achieve a 90%+ Frisco model is to purchase the undecs and add the details, custom paint and decals instead of purchasing a RTR Frisco car and then having to make the modifications at an additional price. Of course, each modeler has to make this decision himself. This is what makes the hobby interesting and fun and keeps the manufacturers in business.

    Joe Toth
     
  8. yardmaster

    yardmaster Administrator Staff Member Administrator Frisco.org Supporter

    Now that you're building models, perhaps she would be willing to buy you scads of Evergreen styrene, brass z-shape channel, and casting resin and materials...then you could start cranking out a fleet of Frisco Howe-truss boxcars of your own.

    If you do, tell her that I would place an order for a few. :)

    Best Regards,
     
  9. Joseph Toth

    Joseph Toth Member

    Visit www.proto48.org and go to Gallery. Look up models built by Robert Leners. Check out the neat Frisco wood single sheathed boxcar, SL-SF 160158.

    Evergreen and Oddballs Decals would be proud!

    Joe Toth
     
  10. mktjames

    mktjames Member

    When I wrote about twelve passenger trains for the DFW area I meant twelve different railroads with the ability to build twenty different name trains. Frisco gets two. This has been a project since 1995 in sourcing out the correct cars for the 1948-1950 time era. Most Texas passenger trains were 8-10 cars and pull well with two locomotives, whether they be steam or diesel. I want to see at a convention model train operations in ho so I can run my Frisco stuff. How too's and models are fine but I don't need a group of modelers to look at historical equipment or do excursions, thats family vacations. We got a 4500 class and decapod here in Dallas so my interest is ho train operation to participate in. mktjames
     
  11. friscobob

    friscobob Staff Member Staff Member Frisco.org Supporter

    After seeing the latest offering by Athearn for a RTR Airslide hopper in Frisco for 42 bucks, I'm all for scrounging up all the kits I can get my mitts on. I do have several ready-to-roll cars, but the majority of my fleet were all put-together-yourself types. BTW- most of my Frisco cars were painted & decaled by me, especially the Walthers Airslides and Athearn 54-foot P/S covered hoppers. Some of the details may look a bit clunky, but it doesn't bother me much.
     
  12. Joseph Toth

    Joseph Toth Member

    If a model is professionally painted and decaled the "clunky" look won´t be noticed. "Clunky" details, like covered hopper bracing, can be filed or sanded down for a more prototypical look. I would not even consider paying over $400.00 for ten HO plastic imported models. I will leave this to the doctors and lawyers and such! Earlier this year, Weaver had a sale on many of their O scale plastic freight cars at $19.95 each! They may not be as detailed as the newer Atlas-O models but again, when pro-painted and decaled, they serve their purpose well for me. I am now retired and on a fixed income with medical and everyday living expenses like trying to keep a roof over my head that doesn´t leak when it rains, thus I am preparing to sell off many railroad books to finance my proposed terminal switching pike along my 18 foot long livingroom wall.

    I have quite a few well sought after out-of-print titles that should do the trick. I will offer them at compeditive pricing and not ask unrealistic "collector" prices. I am shocked that the prices some book dealers attempt to get for well used railroad titles. My books are in like new condition and of course, non-Frisco. I am trying to replace some of my Frisco books that got away from me as a matter of fact.

    At any rate, the older models in most scales despite some with moulded on details still look real sharp and bring out the true spirit of the Frisco with the pro-paint and decals. The new generation fine scale models are great for show but are not constructed with "ruff" handling on layouts. One derailment with a boxcar ending up on its side will probably need a ladder replaced! The older economical Athearn yellow and blue box era cars can withstand a lot of operation that the newer cars just can´t take. It never brought tears to my eyes when a car derailed and left a few scratches or even a broken step. The 1:87 scale switchman had heck to remount though! But my model railroad provided employee health care and a shot of glue replaced a broken arm as well! In 1962 I was a paper boy and threw The Tampa Times after school. An Athearn yellow box kit for a regular run boxcar has a retail price of $1.49. Special run cars, like the Mopac "Eagle" multi-color 40 foot box retailed @ $1.69.

    At 65 I can´t see micro-details on $40.00+ boxcars anyway. A pro-paint and decal job would work for me on an older Athearn boxcar as long as I receive the enjoyment from the hobby as I did when I was 15!

    Joe Toth
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 23, 2011

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