An older Shake ’n’ Take project

The so-called “Shake ’n’ Take” projects originated at the annual Cocoa Beach, Florida “Prototype Rails” meeting, under the auspices of Greg Martin. Greg’s original idea, with input from Richard Hendrickson, was to identify simple projects of freight car conversion that would be easy to do, and would get modelers into the idea of modifying or kitbashing freight car kits to obtain other prototypes. 

At the beginning, this was intended to be simple enough effort that it could be worked on at the meeting, for example, replacing box car doors and running board for a kit. But almost immediately, more creative and more involved projects emerged, quickly putting paid to the idea of in-meeting projects. Ever since, they have been extensive builds, sometimes quite extensive ones.

Over the years, I have skipped a few that didn’t meet my interests, but have built most of them (I gave away two projects after realizing I really didn’t need those particular cars). Recently I worked up an appetite for digging into a project of this kind, and started picking through my stored kits and projects of all types, hoping to find an unbuilt S’n’T project, not even being sure there still was one. But I did find one! the 2015 project for a Rock Island double-door 40-foot automobile car. This looked like fun, and I started right in on it.

The prototype is a 350-car order built in 1937 for the Rock Island, cars 161000–161349. Originally all 350 cars were equipped with stowable Evans automobile racks, and the cars were assigned to AAR Class XAR. In later years, AAR introduced an additional class, XMR, to identify cars whose auto racks could be stowed to permit general merchandise loading, and these Rock Island cars were then re-classified XMR. Below is a photo taken by Col. Chet McCoid at San Diego, on December 26, 1954. The car has different lettering than the as-built cars, but the car body is essentially unchanged (collection of Bob’s Photo).

The project is based on the Athearn/Roundhouse body. This body has Dreadnaught ends with 4/5 end ribs (4 ribs in the upper section, 5 in the lower) and has cast-on ladders and, on the B end, cast-on handbrake details. The S’n’T project gives us correct 5/5 ends and no annoying cast-on details. The body luckily benefited by Athearn upgrading it in more recent years, so the doors are acceptable, a big step forward considering the old “Blue Box” boxcar doors.

I did not get the full project part set and thus have to supply the underframe, no big problem. I have a bunch of old C&BT Shops floors and underframes, given to me by Dick Schweiger when I knew him in Pittsburgh. Shown below is the Athearn/Roundhouse body, on which you can see the features described above, along with the the correct 5/5 replacement ends, the underframe, and a nice replacement wood running board.

First step was to removed the poor molding of the running board, vaguely resembling a steel-grid running board (already done in the photo above), and then to cut the ends out of the body. For this, I used a razor saw and cut inside the ends because it is a simple cut.

Then a hobby knife was used to make a cut across the top of each end, to remove it. Here is the body with ends removed.

Now I can begin putting together the components for the completed model. More on that in following posts.

Tony Thompson