Restoration Job

One thing I keep my eye out for at swap meets is old Ambroid and Northeastern wood kits. Some of them were in the Ambroid 1 of 5000 series, although Northeastern eventually reissued many of these under its own brand. I'm not particular! I like to restore them and, as part of the restoration, bring them up to current operating standards, including Kadee couplers and NMRA weight.

I recently found an Ambroid ACL Hopper Bottom Phosphate Car. The announcement ad from the October 1960 MR is at left. The price in 1960 was $5.25, trucks included (but not couplers). These were premium kits and, at $5.25, not cheap. An inflation calculator I found on the web said that an item that cost $5.25 in 1960 would be $42.10 today -- which is actually about the current cost of a premium freight car, though there's really no comparison in what's now available. We've come a long way.

Naturally, I wasn't going to get anything like a $5.25 car kit from my allowance. I was 12 in 1960, and my carbuilding skills weren't anything up to building it anyhow. Still, I could aspire! Restoring items like this helps me stay in touch with my 12-year-old self. I recently subscribed to the MR Digital Archive (which is where I got the Ambroid ad), and reading the old issues of MR from those days reminds me, among other things, of how big a struggle I had with my parents when they wanted me to drop the hobby. Luckily, the trains won, worse distractions lost out. Good outcome, but my parents would never have agreed.

Here's the phosphate car as I found it at the most recent Simi Valley swap meet. I think the guy wanted 50 cents for it.

It had been competently assembled, though pretty beat-up. No decals were with it. Most important, it hadn't been weighted. It took me until my early 20s to realize that if you build a wood craftsman kit, you had to add enough weight for it to track well.

Just for fun, I ran it up and down behind an RS-3 -- couldn't wait to get back to age 12!

The car was way too light, and the couplers drooped. Someone had replaced what was there originally with some McHenrys, but in addition, although the Ambroid plastic coupler pocket looked sort of like Kadee, it really didn't work the same, so the boxes and McHenrys both had to go. The whole thing was the typical coupler-kludge you find on cars like these:

I was able to pry off one of the lower sides and get some weights out of my junk box to bring it up to something more like NMRA weight. When I pried the side off, some of the channel pieces went south, and I meant to replace them with styrene shapes anyhow, so I cleaned off the whole lower side. I got rid of the original coupler pockets and replaced them with old-style Kadee boxes.

All that's mostly left will be replacing a ladder and some wire parts and paint.