Tag Archives: upgrading plastic

Tichy hopper upgrades

I was trolling around on a hard drive the other day and stumbled upon a Bill Welch blog post. Bill originally posted this in September 2019 to the Steam Era Freight Car discussion list. It came up recently on that list. Here’s Bill’s work on upgrading an HO scale Tichy USRA hopper kit.

A few years ago, the Boys at the Clearwater Car Shops built a few of the Tichy Train Group USRA two-bay hoppers for their favorite railroads. A few details were installed to upgrade the fine model.

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Building a Western Pacific PFE R-30-9 reefer

Photo from Bob’s Photo collection

George Toman shares his work updating a couple HO scale reefer kits. George has some cool techniques in this post.

In 1923, the Western Pacific joined Pacific Fruit Express (PFE) and added a number of cars to the PFE fleet. The cars were built to current PFE standards and designs. They featured a WP herald on the right side. Although owned by the WP, were part of the general PFE fleet.

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Upgrading Red Caboose M-26 boxcars

It’s time for me, RCW web guy Eric Hansmann, to make a blog post. I’ve had several of these Red Caboose HO scale plastic boxcar kits in my stash for years. I needed more Baltimore & Ohio boxcars for my 1926 fleet, so it was time to build a couple. I started these earlier in 2021 and just finished weathering them, eight months later.

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