More Reefers

[jwb]

There have been a couple of interesting threads lately on perishable traffic and Accurail PFE reefers, and I thought I'd post on some recent and not so recent projects, but rather than hijack either of those good threads, I thought I'd start my own.

As Matt and others have noted, the Accurail steel sided cars are quite good, but I thought I'd start with some things I did when I had some time in the 1990s. Tony Thompson in his original RMC series on modeling PFE reefers pointed out that the Mantua/Tyco plastic reefer could be fixed up to resemble one series of PFE rebuilt cars, and Robert Smaus then took that about three steps farther, bashing the Tyco sides onto a Tichy underframe with new ends and roof. I wound up steering a middle course, leaving the Tyco body as is, but using the Tichy PFE underframe, which is available separately. I did a bunch.     They were fairly inexpensive as these things go -- I was getting old Tyco reefers at swap meets for maybe $3 apiece, and counting the Tichy underframes, trucks, couplers, details, and decals, they ran me maybe $10-12 total each. All old freight cars are now more expensive at swaps.

Then some guy at another swap unloaded a dozen or so Athearn 40-foot underframes, so I did some more Tyco kitbashing. Here's what's probably the last one of these I'm ever going to do:     Styrene floor, Athearn underframe, Details West brake gear, A-Line weights. This got me a more generic car, and I used photos in various all-color books, combined with the Micro Scale MDT reefer set. I make no claim that the details on these cars follow prototypes very closely, but they work as layout models. Here's one of these more generic ones that I finished:    

You have to scrounge to dig up Walthers General American cars, with the horizontal rivet joint across the sides, but they're actually quite good, especially considering the die work is 20 years old or more:     It's a shame Walthers is bringing them in now only as RTR, overpriced for what they are, but I've either found them cheaper as old stock in stores here and there, or got one or two like this one that Walthers was clearing out on their web site. I'd love to find some in ART orange.

Here's an Accurail.     After I got this, I began to wonder if the Milwaukee/URTX cars were all General American with horizontal rivet rows, but I don't have enough information to know for sure at this point. Frankly, if it's wrong, I'm not too bent out of shape about it.