Swap Meet Update

I've made a lot of progress on the treasures I picked up at the swap meet two weeks ago. I tossed the trucks from the Roma Wine tank car, plugged the bolster holes with plastic sprue, built out some coupler mounts from styrene, and drilled both the truck and coupler mounts #50 and tapped 2-56:

Then I added weight, couplers, and trucks with metal wheels and touched up the paint. Here's the finished car:

It now comes in at 3.75 ounces, spot on for NMRA weight. There's a page on this car here. Actually, although the other paint schemes shown aren't prototypical, at least as far as I know, they don't look at all bad. I won't go out of my way to find one, but if one of those pops up at another swap for 50 cents, I'll probably take it!

Here's one of the three Roundhouse gravel cars I picked up:

The pivot posts in the coupler boxes were a little too big for the Kadees to be an easy fit, so I had to do a lot of work reaming both the couplers and the centering springs to get them to work easily -- but they finally did. Over the years I've found footage in various videos of operations in open pit mines, quarries, and so forth that shows industrial cars like these in operation. They mostly seem to be painted gray. I'll need to add numbers and heavy weathering to these down the road as well, but I'm not sure how I'll finally use them, except that I think they're a good match for "critter" diesels and things like the Bachmann 0-6-0Ts.