Restoring an Ulrich hopper car, Part 2

In the preceding post, I showed an old Ulrich twin hopper car that has been in my “some day” project box for quite a while. It lacks couplers and has some other issues, as I described in that initial post (you can see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/12/restoring-old-ulrich-hopper-car.html . 

As I showed in that post, by including the Ulrich instructions for the oldest version of this model, there was a pine wood center sill and balsa bolster supports. There are inevitably issues with maintaining these parts, let alone modifying them. 

After the post appeared, Dave Vos in Minnesota contacted me, mentioning that back when these cars were current, he too had had issues with the wood center sill, and had purchased from Ulrich some of the cast metal underframes used in later versions of this kit. More importantly, he had a spare and offered it to me.

This frame, of course, was designed to fit the parts of the older car body. When Ulrich replaced the former wood frame with this cast frame, they continued to use all the previous body parts, which were assembled around the new frame in about the same way as for the old wood frame. 

The only task for me at this point was to remove all the old wood and glue, and to finish cleaning up the cast frame (Dave had done part of the frame cleanup). Here is the cleaned-up car body underneath, prior to repainting the brass slope sheets black. Hopper doors have been temporarily removed.

Next I needed to re-attach the AB brake gear to the new cast frame, for which I used canopy glue. Then came making new cover plates for the coupler boxes. I used 0.020-inch styrene sheet, and fitted it to the inset edges of the boxes, along with a center pin hole. With Kadee no. 158 whisker couplers installed, the underframe looked like this.

The next step was to finish painting the completed frame black, and to install it into the car body. I used canopy glue for attachment, and clamped the frame into the body to ensure a good fit and bond. Then the hopper doors were installed with canopy glue, as well as were Ajax hand brake gear, from my parts stash. To complete the car assembly, the original trucks were installed. 

The most noteworthy aspect of the photo above is that the car is far too clean! Clearly it remains to be weathered, as do a couple of other open-top cars recently completed, and that work will likely form a future post. I will certainly use my usual technique with acrylic washes, as described and illustrated in the “Reference pages” at the top right corner of this post.

I expect that the completed car will operate mostly in through trains (what I call a “mainline car”), but if you’re perhaps wondering what any kind of coal traffic is doing on a California layout, you might like to read my post on the topic (it’s at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/02/coal-in-california.html ). 

Tony Thompson