Resin Car Works Chief Frank Hodina was recently trackside and grabbed a batch of photos to share on the blog. Here are his notes. Click on any image here to review a larger size.

I hadn’t taken any model photos recently and thought I should document some of my HO scale fleet on a sceniced portion of the layout. I had installed new LED lights on a portion of the layout and I wanted to see how these look under 6500 Kelvin lights. We lead off with Illinois Central 8976, an old, out-of-the-box Life-Like P2K GP-7. Extras details include MU receptacles, speed recorder, air lines to the truck brake cylinders, a new brass horn, cloth sunshades, and Chet French positioned as the engineer. Chet’s a longtime friend and a retired IC engineer. Chet also knows just about everything and anything you could want to know about the IC.

Here is New York Central 868422, an Accurail offset twin hopper with a 1.5-foot section taken out of the middle to match the length of NYC prototypes. The car body was also raised a bit on the trucks to make the car look taller. The NYC built thousands of offset twins that followed the AAR design but were 1.5-feet shorter and 4-inches taller. I believe the railroad was matching the length of a USRA twin hopper. The car is lettered with a Resin Car Works NYC004 hopper decal set.

NYC 918075 is a kitbash of two Accurail USRA twin hoppers to create a three bay, 70-ton capacity car. The model is also lettered with the RCW NYC004 decal set.

IC 70196 RCW Kit 2.01 built right from the box and is lettered with decals from the kit. The only extra additions were weight, couplers and trucks.

IC 90311 an old Sunshine Models Kit 75.1. It is hard to see the difference between the wire grabs on 90311 and those on the previous RCW car, which has cast-on grab irons.

Chicago & Eastern Illinois 97788 is an out-of-the-box, pre-painted Atlas hopper model. Extra details include slope sheet braces, Wine hatch locks, train line, and cut levers.

SHPX 1367 is a stock Atlas 11,000-gallon insulated tank car with a little extra work. These cars have several errors which can be fixed. Atlas applied some gorgeous paint schemes and they would be a shame not to use. This model was recently finished and needs to be weathered.

The biggest error is the car sits too high on the trucks. The way the model is constructed, this is an easy fix. A thick “washer” is cast to the bolster. Remove this and the spacers under the couplers. Install new coupler boxes and fill in the end stills. The rivet strip along the running board is removed as this is actually the middle tank connection. Round the frame corners and add as much extra brake gear detail as you would like. The trucks also will be replaced.

International-Great Northern/Missouri Pacific 53854 is Sunshine Models Kit 54.4. It was also finished recently and needs to be weathered. We can all use a stock car or two on our layouts!

Another round of Frank’s models will be featured in an upcoming blog post.

Questions and comments can be posted below. Please follow the instructions so your comment can be posted. All comments are reviewed and approved before they appear. To subscribe to this blog, enter your info for a comment and check the last box to notify of new posts by email. Share the blog link with other model railroaders.