New From The Purgatory Box

As someone who likes to get out and railfan, I find it's fairly difficult to find models in any scale that really match the equipment you see trackside in 2019. Locos are the best bet, but if you get down to non-intermodel freight cars, it can be tough. Look at this example of some random boxcars in Oxnard, CA. Other than the TBOX Railbox cars on the right, I'm hard put to identify what the other cars shown are, whether anyone makes a model, and there's definitely going to be a problem finding them lettered for the various short line reporting marks the leasers letter them for these days:

As I thought about this, I ran into a couple of cars in the purgatory box. Both of them were made by permutations of the company variously called LBF, E&C Shops, and Huberts. They were kits at the low end of the price range and just acceptable quality, but they had a lot of models that were post-1980s prototypes. These gave me some hope.

BNSF 725686 seems to be in a grab-bag series of older cars. Many of them seem to be former Railbox cars that were turned back to the Class Is in the early 1980s. I haven't seen any of these out in California, but I've found some photos on RRPicturearcives and Fallen Flags. Notice that LBF or whoever did this one added the yellow post-2005 conspicuity stripes and the newest BNSF Swoosh.

A photo of a different BNSF car that I shot on Cajon shows that these cars stay fairly clean for whatever reason. The lettering on the model looks pretty good.

VCY 172217 is a bigger problem. Golden West Service was a Southern Pacific strategy dating from the late 1980s to finance rebuilt cars after the failure of the Santa Fe merger. VCY was the Ventura County Railway, which got ex-SP cars as part of a complicated financial arrangement. Others went to the Galveston Wharves Railroad.

LBF or whoever it was did an OK job with the paint, although the darker blue the cars were delivered in has faded badly. In addition, the cars that actually went to the VCY weren't like these, they had a single plug door. Also, by about 2010, these cars were returned by the lessor to UP and relettered for SSW and SP, by now just UP reporting marks. So while these cars are still pretty common, this is what they look like now:

Heavily faded and tagged, with the conspicuity stripes and a patch for SP-UP reporting marks and number. As far as I can tell, nobody makes decals for patching and renumbering Golden West Service cars, an important unfilled need for modelers who like to model what they railfan. I did lighten the blue as much as I could by airbrushing a mixture of white and flat finish onto the car. I'll probably at least tag it, and if I can find an easy way to renumber it and patch it, I will.