Ken Soroos shares a story on one of his latest freight car fleet additions. Here’s Ken with more.

A nice surprise arrived a few months ago when Ted Culotta sent me the unfinished HO scale Intermountain composite USRA gondola kit Bill Welch had been working on.

The only thing I had to do was add the coupler lift levers, paint, and letter. Bill had added gusset plates along the side sills, new brass stirrup steps, styrene replacement sides, and 0.010-inch diameter wire grab irons with Nut-Bolt-Washer (NBW) castings. 

Bill was well known in the Prototype Modeling community, especially for his presentations on the “Y’all” railroads of the South and on his “extreme modeling” techniques. That aspect of his work often involved harvesting rivets from old Athearn freight car shells and applying them one at a time to match prototype patterns. They show up here on his added side gusset plates to the gon and on the bottom of his stirrup step support brackets.

I painted the car with Tamiya’s German Grey from a spray can, which provided a thin and smooth base. Chalk marks were from a National Scale Car set.

I still have a few sets of free TC decals.  See the information in the decal section of the Resin Car Works web site.

• Ken Soroos

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Many thanks to Ken Soroos for sharing his work completing one of Bill Welch’s freight car models.

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