Life-Like 40-foot Boxcar

At a recent swap meet, I discovered a Life-Like 40-foot boxcar lettered for Linde Air Products. I mentioned it in this post. Here's how it was when I found it:

Via the HO-Scale Trains Resource, I found a little more info on these cars. I'm not sure if there's a good history of Life-Like available on the web. They offered crude scenery products around the time I started in HO around 1960. I'm pretty sure they got started with operating models by acquiring the old Varney tooling sometime in the 1960s. By the 1970s they'd moved production to China and were releasing updated paint schemes.

The 40-foot boxcar is crude Varney tooling from the 1950s. The contemporary Athearn 40-foot boxcar is much better in comparison. However, some of the paint schemes on the newer Life-Like cars are appealing.

The problem is that trucks and couplers need to be replaced. Michael Cawdrey, an Australian modeler who follows Guilford in New England, got hold of one of these in the very appealing Maine Central scheme.

Following the photos he's posted on Photobucket, it looks like he finally got stumped by all the upgrades he'd need to do and grounded it with a really good weathering job. If I run into a Maine Central car at a swap (at least, at the right price), I'd pick it up. I see Life Like did BC Rail and Lehigh Valley versions in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and at the right price, I'd probably grab one of these as well -- wish I could hire Mr Cawdrey to weather them, though!

Here I tossed the trucks and plugged the mounting holes in the chassis with pieces of sprue:

You can see that I also added styrene pads to level up mounts for Kadee coupler boxes. I cut off the sprues level with the bolsters and drilled out #50 for 2-56 screws, also mounting the Kadee boxes the same way:

I added weight up to NMRA standards with pennies, stuck on with silicone caulk:

Here is the finished version, lightly weathered to cut the day-glo shine:

These cars actually held a tank inside the boxcar body, but they looked just like 40-foot boxcars. As such, they lasted into the 1980s, though not in the Life-Like paint scheme. You could see thm on Cajon pass up to the end -- here are two I found near Ontario, CA on the SP about 1981: