Reefer Madness!

[gna]

As I mentioned in my last post on TM cars, I've been acquiring some older freight cars and kits from some acquaintances. I purchased a lot of MDC Roundhouse Old Time cars, many of which are reefers:

   

I also bought this mystery Swift reefer, and the old Mantua reefers were thrown in. A little crude, but I like them. I plan on painting the roofs and ends mineral brown.
   

The Swift Reefer scales out to about 37 feet long, and has some nice detail, like a Miner lever hand brake. Unfortunately, grabs and ladders are missing and/or broken. My Googling leads me to believe it is a Red Caboose Mather Reefer. They seem to belong to Intermountain now, but the kit is OOP and parts don't seem to be available. I was going to try Tichy ladders and grabs from my LHS. Any advice? Anyone have the car and could take a few pics for me?

[doctorwayne]

I'm not at all familiar with that Swift reefer, but Tichy offers several styles of plastic ladders, and both straight- and drop-style grabirons in phosphor bronze wire.

Your two Armour refers appear to be Tycos. Many had overly-heavy paint, but the detail on these cars is actually quite good beneath that paint. Here's one that's been stripped and repainted. I substituted A-Line sill steps for the original cast-on (or broken off) originals, along with wire grabirons...



The paint is either Floquil or Pollyscale, with dry transfer lettering from C-D-S.
I also had another three which looked like this:



...but all four of them ended up looking like this....



There's a thread on the re-build HERE if you have some time to spare.

Wayne

[gna]

Impressive work, Doctor. I don't think I could pull that off. I may replace the drop steps with wire ones, and paint the roofs and ends, and call it good.

In other news, Intermountain got back to me. They can send me sprues with ladders and grabs, but it's going to cost me $9. I may just use wire grabs I have here and put Tichy ladders on and call it good.

[doctorwayne]

The ladders alone are well-worth the $9.00, and I would suggest you take them up on it.

I recently purchased a couple of things on-line, needed for my Challenge projects. One was a decal set from Westerfield, which was, if I recall correctly, about $7.00 U.S. By the time it got to me, the total cost was $22.89 CDN.
Similarly, I order five 3' pieces of small brass shapes (angles, channels, etc.) from Special Shapes. Their minimum order was $25.00, so a couple of those items were added only to make-up the order. For such specialty stuff, like the decals, the $35.00 U.S. cost of the material was reasonable. Total cost, though, with shipping included, was $87.31 CDN. Imagine my surprise when it arrived at my door and the delivery guy said, "That'll be $37.10, pal!" Neither of these orders was same-day shipping: the decals were sent USPS regular mail, and the brass shapes took two weeks to get here. Those five pieces of brass and three #79 drill bits cost $124.41 CDN.! I'm starting to understand what our friends in Australia have been complaining about for years.
Nine bucks for their very nicely-done ladders and the grabirons, too, is a very good deal....take it!

I used Intermountain ladders on my scratchbuilt Seaboard boxcar, as they were the most suitable of all the ones which I had on hand.



Wayne