A Couple Of Prewar Items

One of the things I look for at swap meets is really, really old HO stuff. Mostly it's just too far gone to do much with, but I did find a couple of items at the last Simi Valley swap. The first is an N&W "battleship" coal gon. It has metal ends, a wood sub-body, a crude wood center sill, metal ends, and embossed printed cardboard sides. I think it may be Varney, but the web doesn't have much on Varney that's this old.

The bottom view shows the trucks, brass wheels, steel axles, white metal sideframes. The wheels are dirty enough to make me think someone ran this at one time. It has the old cast metal dummy couplers that swivel on escutcheon pins.

The trucks don't roll very well, but with some lube, they might work out. I got rid of the dummy couplers and installed Kadee 158 style boxes with some McHenry's temporarily installed:

With some cleaning and paint touchup, this could be a runner -- weight is pretty good.

Here's another one that I can't identify, but I think it may have been a kit. Again, I am thinking it's prewar. The hand painted lettering suggests this, too.

The tender body is embossed cardboard. You can see that it never had couplers, so it never ran. A work car with a tender body mounted on it was actually fairly common, it held water for showers, etc in the work outfit. However, I don't think they held coal. I am going to try to deconstruct this, clean it up and repaint it, add weight and Kadees, and make it into a runner.