More about Chrysler trucks

In a recent post about the steel express refrigerator conversions of Pacific Fruit Express, I mentioned the Chrysler freight trucks applied to 25 of the cars when they were converted to passenger express service. These were visually distinctive because of the use of an external hydraulic snubber, which projected upwards on the side frame. (You can read that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-steel-express-cars-of-pfe.html .) Here is a photo of the prototype truck (PFE photo, CSRM).

I mentioned in that post that I had made representations of Chrysler trucks for my own car fleet’s PFE steel express reefers, using a casting from Ross Dando’s Twin Star Cars company. This was a nice part and certainly an accurate representation of what you see above. Here is that truck on my PFE car:

I don’t know whether Twin Star Cars will necessarily return that part to inventory. But there is an alternative and perhaps better option today: a company called “Plate C Model Prototypes” has made a 3-D printed version of this truck, now marketing it through 3D Central. You can see the 3D Central trucks at this link: https://3dcentraltrains.com/search?type=product%2Cpage%2Carticle&options%5Bprefix%5D=last&q=trucks . The Chrysler trucks are on page 2, and I used Part 4103-01, the original truck design. As of this writing, they are in stock. (The site warns that things can go in and out of stock, so patience might be necessary).

They really are nicely done. I show a rather close-up photo below, and in my opinion, this compares favorably with the Twin Star Cars version or the prototype photo above. Note in the lower view how much the snubber projects, as should be the case.

But if I already had a nice version of these trucks under my PFE express reefer, why did I buy another pair? Three years ago, I posted about the work I did, modeling one of the General American-Evans pioneer DF box cars, where DF = Damage-Free loaders. (That post can be found here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/02/gaex-box-cars-part-2-modeling.html .) 

The just-linked post has more details, but briefly, the consortium of General American, the car builder, and Evans Products Co., the DF-loader maker, built 540 cars, 340 of them with conventional vertical panels, 8 on each side of the door. The photo below shows an example (George Sisk photo, Charles Winters collection), drawn from the 110 cars built in the late fall of 1950 and leased to the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The prototype GAEX cars had Chrysler trucks (visible above), which originally I decided to ignore, and simply used conventional trucks under the model. But in that post, I prophetically wrote, “Maybe I’ll come back later and redo the trucks.” That’s the reason for buying another pair: so I can complete my GAEX box car.

I won’t go into the model itself, as the background and modeling was adequately described in the two original posts (the second is linked two paragraphs above). For the current topic, what’s important is that now I can “finish” that model with correct trucks. Here are the Plate C trucks installed:

I am glad to make this model more accurate with the replacement of its kit trucks with these impressive 3-D printed versions of the Chrysler freight truck. This is yet another example of the accomplishments of 3-D printing in our hobby.

Tony Thompson