Bringing In The Ambroid Western Union Material Car

I like a lot of vintage model railroad equipment, but high on my list is Ambroid 1 of 5000 cars. However, if they haven't been assembled with an eye to operation, they need a lot of work in addition to the usual restoration. The Western Union material car I found at the recent swap needed weight and other tweaks.

I was able to pry off part of one side of the car so I could slide in some extra weight:

The underframe was probably the best part of the car:

However, the couplers needed work:

Whew! The boxes were held in with spikes. This was the sort of thing I did in my teens, when these kits were new, which makes me think the car was probably assembled about 1960. Also, the Kadee coupler boxes were the original MKD style. I pulled these, cleaned them up, reassembled them with better parts where needed, and reattached them with screws:

I removed the diaphragm (the cars didn't have these in their last years) and straightened the grabs. I touched up the paint by masking off the lettering and airbrushing the body with a new coat of Pullman Green, which doesn't match the original, the now-discontinued Floquil:

I need to scrounge a matching fourth digit to renumber the car from a scrap decal set. Then I'll blend the colors in with weathering. The car now weighs about 4 ounces, not quite up to NMRA weight, but close enough. One thing I like about George Sellios's F&SM is the use he makes of vintage cars like these: