Recently I was given a box of old HO toy trains and brass track from my neighbor, Andy Laird, who had passed away. Most of the models were ancient Athearn and Tyco locos and cars, many with missing or broken parts. But one model caught my attention. An Athearn reefer from the days when these cars had “operating” doors, it could perhaps be made into a “scenery” car, being loaded at a packing house with doors open.
Here’s the model. It’s classic Athearn, and has its original horn-hook couplers (in a coupler box with a screw lid, not the later Athearn steel clip) and the usual Athearn black running board, ice hatches, and crude brake wheel, all of which should be boxcar red.
Similarly, the interlocking piece of the side over the door, which anchors the roof, is roof color, not side color. A couple of hatch covers are missing. But all that is easily fixed, and maybe I can do something with the doors.
Note that the car is lettered FDEX, for the small number of double-deck cars rostered by Fruit Growers. Why Athearn chose this scheme is unknown, but maybe it could be kept.
But how about those doors? The hinge representations are huge, and a couple are broken. One option would be to discard these doors and remove the “hinges,” then make new styrene doors. If the idea to model open doors is pursued, an alternative is to use the old door, but thicken the door to represent its insulation in the prototype.
To decide how to model these doors, we can begin with a notion of what an open steel reefer door looks like. The photo below, taken during lettuce crate loading at Salinas, California (PFE photo, CSRM), shows open doors clearly. You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.
Note that the insulated door thickness at the top tapers right to the outer edge of the door, and the inner surface is wood (varnished, as is the car interior). This would be easy to represent on replaced doors.
(By the way, these insulated doors form a “plug” in the insulation when closed. That’s why reefer terminology in the 1950s distinguished between “sliding” and “swinging” doors; all were plug doors.)
Now to the model. I began by working on the roof features. First, Athearn’s poor rendition of a steel grid running board is removed, as are the hatch covers and the hatch “hinge” areas. I showed this upgrade in a blog post long ago (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/08/ujpgrading-old-models-athearn-reefers.html ).
Then small pieces of styrene strip were used to close the openings where the latch bar connections were, the hinge gap is puttied. Here’s a repeat photo of the earlier project, with one hatch cover still to be added, and prior to adding latch bars. The mo del shown below has an etched metal running board installed. The FDEX cars were built with wood running boards, but eventually received metal ones. I may do the same.
After consideration, it was evident that the old doors weren’t worth saving. So I simply made new doors using styrene sheet, 0.060-inch thick and two scale feet wide (like the prototype), then filed at a 45-degree angle at the top (see prototype photo above). Here’s such a door. Since only the inside will be shown, there is no need to add the outer door surface details.
In the prototype, the edges of doors were given a flexible canvas covering over a “spongy,” compressible material that would be compressed when the door was closed, minimizing air leakage. Color photos of this canvas show a dirty gray color and the inside surface a natural wood color. But painting and installation of my model doors will be covered in a future post.
Tony Thompson
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