Four Cars For $9

I'm a sucker for the vintage cars you can often find very cheaply at swap meets. Last Saturday at the Simi Valley swap, a seller had a couple boxes of vintage cars selling for $3 each or four for $9. I bit.

This is an Ambroid Western Union material car kit from 1959. I already have one of these, and this one is beat-up, with about a C-plus assembly job, but I think I can fix it up with some work. In fact, although I already have one, there were 20 prototypes according to the 1959 MR review, and the car is a lot of fun.

Here is a Life-Like boxcar from the 1980s, I guess. The prototype lettered for Linde was an AAR steel boxcar body that contained a tank for liquid oxygen. Once I got the car home and looked it over, it comes from Varney tooling from the 1950s. The most recent Life-Like runs had interesting paint schemes, like this one, but they have the usual truck-mounted horn hook couplers, pizza cutter plastic wheels, the big bolster holes, and they need weight.

AHM stock car from the 1960s or so. Needs the same work as the Life-Like car

The prototype is a New York Central car (John R, I can send you an article on doing these if you'll give me your e-mail). However, I wanted a green and yellow CNW, and this was the easiest way to get one.

I hesitated over this last one. It looked vaguely like a Walthers, but not quite, and the paint has got to go -- but for less than $3, I decided to give it a try.

Now that I've been able to look more closely, it seems to be an Athearn 4-truck flat body bashed with Walthers span bolsters, plus some other interesting changes. It has some real possibilities.

I'm almost done with the Linde box and am well along with others. I'll post on what I do with some or all of these.