HOn3 cars for TrainNut

[nachoman]

   


When I was a kid, I really liked boxcars that had doors that could be opened and closed. As I grew up, I realized that real trains rarely have open boxcar doors while in transit, and that the sacrifice for operating car doors was the oversize door slides on the athearn boxcars. Now, I would rather have scale appearance than operating doors. These Rail Line box cars have all the scale parts, and the doors would operate if they are left unglued. The instructions imply to leave the doors unglued, but my experience says otherwise. Being that the parts are scale, much use by 1:1 fingers on the miniscule door slides will certainly lead to breakage. Or handling the car in order to operate the door is likely one will break off tiny stirrups or brake wheels. Another problem is that much operation of the doors will wear the paint from the slides, exposing the shiny plastic underneath. The design also means the doors can be modeled either opened or closed, but glued in position. In deciding how I wanted to position the doors, I considered several things. First I looked at photos on this website:

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These photos were taken toward the very end of the Rio Grande narrow gauge when the railroad was probably more careless with maintenance. Yet, most of the boxcars in the trains have their doors closed, but a few have the door slightly open.

Then I considered a few other points:
1) A boxcar in the process of being loaded will have it's door open on the side that faces the loading dock. At all other times the door is supposed to be closed. But during the times the door is open it is facing a loading dock and less visible.
2) If the doors will be glued in position, it is better to have them closed because this is the more likely position they will be.
3) In transit, loaded cars will most certainly always have their doors closed unless they are malfunctioning, and empty cars are the only situation where the doors may have been left open. If a modeled car has open doors, you know it is empty, but if it has closed doors it may be either empty or loaded.

My conclusion is that in lieu of operating doors, it is probably more prototypical to leave them closed. But, since open doors look cool and add visual interest, I think I will leave one door on one car open.