Reworking a PFE car kit

In response to a recent question I was asked (“Why don’t you write more about PFE cars?”), I will describe recent work on a Red Caboose HO scale kit for a PFE reconditioned reefer, kit RC-4121-3, for a car of PFE Class R-30-12-9. There are a number of things I will choose to do for this kit.

I’ll begin with the kit as it comes from the box. It’s nicely decorated (as they always say in magazine reviews), but it is the 1936–1942 paint scheme, with single railroad emblems on each side. It’s shown below.

The car body above is molded in orange plastic. This is both good news and bad news. It means, on the good side, that lettering can be removed without affecting the background color; but on the bad side, the plastic is translucent, and needs to have the car interior painted a neutral color like dark gray to kill the translucence.  

This paint scheme was rare on wood-sheathed cars by 1950 and essentially absent by 1953, because newer paint schemes after World War II, and very large volumes of shop work in the postwar years, meant that a wood-sheathed car like this would undoubtedly have been repainted by my modeling year of 1953. 

Here is the scheme that is far more suitable for my modeling year, in a George Sisk photo from the Charles Winters collection. As is documented in the Southern Pacific Freight Car Painting and Lettering Guide (SP Historical & Technical Society, Upland, CA, 2016), authored by Dick Harley and me, page 141, this is the 1950 PFE scheme, with all side hardware orange, along with sill steps, and both railroad medallions black and white. Dimensional data and other lettering details differ from the kit lettering, so all kit lettering needs to go.

Since there is no significant part of the lettering worth saving, nor is it particularly well rendered, I removed all of it with Scalecoat stripper, on both sides and ends. I then fired up the airbrush and added a coat on the car sides of Star brand STR-27, “Daylight Orange,” (a color adopted by PFE eight years before the more-famous SP “Daylight” trains). The same paint was airbrushed onto the sprues of side hardware parts (sprues D and G), provided in the kit in black, so they would be ready to be applied to the body. 

Next I assembled the kit. For the most part, this is simply following instructions. But there are a few things that require explication. Some have been presented before, in a report on a similar car kit (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/01/reconditioned-pfe-car-part-2-model.html ).

For features of the prototype PFE cars that were reconditioned — being formerly cars of Class R-30-12, they were re-classed when reconditioned as Class R-30-12-9, then after World War II this was simplified by omitting the original -12, making them simply Class R-30-9 — one can consult Chapter 7 in the PFE book (Thompson, Church and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000). A number of details are provided about the 7694 cars of this class, PFE’s largest.

As I do when car weights are not supplied in a kit, I glued two 5/8-11 steel nuts inside the car body, using canopy cement. This gives plenty of weight, and canopy glue is perfect for joining dissimilar materials, as is the case here. 

One last point relates to the roof. In the last group of R-30-9 cars, steel ice hatches were applied and ice hatch platforms removed, cars PFE 95737–98718. And note in the prototype photo above of PFE 98444 that wood running boards were retained; all these cars were reconditioned during 1937–1940, when this was usual practice. I will do the same, as I’ll describe in a future post.

Tony Thompson