I received a question via email a few months back, and it’s been bumping around in my head every since. It touched on the fine freight car kits from Ted Culotta’s Speedwitch Media. I have in fact posted a couple of times about these kits, once about a kit I built (concluding with this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/01/building-resin-box-car-part-3.html ), and once about a kit that was built for me by Pierre Oliver (described here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/09/class-50-4-auto-cars-new-update.html ). But that’s all I’ve posted.
I decided I could describe a little about other Speedwitch kits that are in my fleet. I’ll write today about Speedwitch kit no. 105, for an MKT (Missouri-Kansas-Texas, nicknamed “Katy”) single-sheathed box car. The prototype cars were built in 1923 and early 1924, 1500 cars in the 76001–77500 series, and in 1925, 1000 cars from Mt. Vernon Car Co. (95000–95999 series). As Ted pointed out, these cars were the backbone of the Katy boxcar fleet until the late 1940s, when the railroad began to purchase 40-foot steel box cars to supplant them.
The cars were originally painted conventional boxcar red with white lettering, but in 1937, the Katy introduced what became a famous paint scheme, chrome yellow with black lettering. Box cars continued to be so painted until about the end of 1947, when the railroad returned to boxcar red, but cars remaining in the yellow scheme were only slowly repainted, and were photographed into the late 1950s. I naturally could not resist having one of the cars in yellow.
Here is a photo (from Speedwitch’s book, Volume 1 of Focus on Freight Cars, by Richard Hendrickson), showing one of these single-sheathed cars in its original boxcar red paint (the reweigh date on the car is January 1936). Note, incidentally, the railroad’s initials on the door.
The kit instructions include a poorly reproduced but informative undated photo of one of these cars in yellow, credited to Big Four Graphics. The paint scheme reflects that shown above, just in reverse contrast.
As usual, the Speedwitch kit includes very complete and helpful instructions. I don’t always need all the detailed guidance, but it’s reassuring to have it in front of me. And the one-piece body casting is a big help.
As with most kit building projects, the first step is the underframe. Here is what the instructions direct us to do:
My model’s underframe is quite similar, an easy process following the directions. You will notice a little overspray of yellow onto the underbody; I decided this might well be prototypical, and left it in place. It’s not noticeable in normal operation, in any case.
After lettering was complete, I weathered the car fairly well, being a car obviously not repainted for several years at least. The completed model is shown below.
This was a kit that produced a very nice result, as one expects from Speedwitch Media. The final result is a box car that I enjoy owning and operating, not least because of its nearly unique color scheme for box cars in my modeling year of 1953. The car is an active participant in many of my layout operating sessions.
Tony Thompson