Vintage

I probably have an attitude to the hobby that's a little like the guys who collect tinplate -- many of them like to relive the excitement of toy trains that they had when they were kids, either running them themselves or just wishing they had them then. I'm not really into tinplate, but when I started to read MR and the other hobby magazines when I was about 10 years old, I found what was in the stories and ads delightful, and I still like to recapture that delight.

However, I have a feeling that none of that stuff ran very well in the 1940s and 50s. The motors weren't good, the gears were plastic and wore out quickly (if they worked at all), the couplers weren't much good, the wheels and trucks were bad, and so forth. So what I like to do is track down some of the older models from the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s and try to bring them up to date for contemporary use.

The big things that have to be redone are trucks, couplers, wheels, and weight, as well as touchup of paint and replacement of parts where needed. Here's an example of an Ulrich N&W hopper from the 1950s that I now run with stuff 60 years newer:

It's a perfectly acceptable layout model. Here's another Ulrich hopper that's in the pipeline:

For starters, it needs contemporary trucks, wheels, and couplers. But as on the N&W hopper above, couplers are actually a big issue. I had to hack away at the 1950s coupler pockets with a Dremel on the N&W to carve out an area where I could install new Kadee 158s. The guy who had the D&H car here apparently did the same with a milling machine, but he stopped short:

He had the right idea, which will make things much easier for me, but it looks like, at least on the left, he tried to attach a coupler pocket with epoxy, which probably lasted a few hours at best. Why'd he go to all the trouble of milling and then not just drill #50 and tap 2-56? Who knows?

I probably held off on this one for a long time because the factory paint here is wrong -- the prototype D&H cars were black. But now I think out of respect for what it is, I'll just go ahead and finish it in red, new trucks, Kadee 158s (mounted with screws drilled and tapped), probably heavy weathering to take attention away from the color.

Another 1950s manufacturer was Central Valley. I get the impression that these kits were beyond a lot of modelers at the time; almost all that I find at swap meets aren't finished. For instance:

I'll need to dig up the grabs from another 1950s kit and finish this one. Here's another Central Valley I pulled out of the backlog not long ago:

Typical deal, one truck missing, dummy couplers, generally beat up. Here's the underframe:

You can see where the guy discovered, as I did long ago, that the Central Valley original dress-snap truck attachment was a bad idea. That was apparently back when dummy couplers were still an option! I found a set of original Central Valley sideframes, added new Kadee wheels, got rid of the dummy couplers, and at least cleaned up the chassis:

Still a way to go, but with Kadees and some paint touchup, it'll actually belong on a layout.

What's a little sad is that most of the vintage cars I find at swaps probably never gave their earlier owners any satisfaction. With work, though, they can be as delightful now as they could have been then. Maybe more to me -- gives me a sense of maybe fixing things I could have done better a long time ago.