Models And Early Railfan Days

By 1960, I was in my early teens and had begun to look more closely at trains, which fascinated me from early childhood. Over the next several years I was able to ride the PRR main from New Brunswick to Philadelphia, and then much more frequently from New York to Washington. One of the things that fascinated me was the PRR's hopper cars, and as I got more interested in modeling, I began to realize that the most common models, the Athearn bluebox quad hopper, the harder-to-find Varney twin, and the impossibly expensive and hard to locate Ulrich cars, didn't look like anything that ran on the PRR at the time.

In high school -- this would be 1965 -- I got a case of mono and spent several weeks in bed. By then I'd located diagrams of the PRR H36 and H39 hoppers, and with lots of time on my hands, I began to build models from cardboard using the dimensions in the diagrams. I eventually finished three of them. I still have the bodies, but the only available decals were Walthers, pretty bad. They were also flimsy and light, and I never was really able to operate them. Over the years I made various efforts to make them operable, but so far, still no success. Here's one in its current condition:

Almost 20 years later, I made a second try at mass producing the kind of PRR hoppers I saw in the early 1960s. This time I had access to a table saw, and I found some scrap lumber at a nearby construction site that I was able to cut roughly into PRR H39s. Here's an idea of what I did:

A finished one is behind it. Not long ago I found another one of the roughly half dozen I finished in the early 1980s, fixed it up a little and got it in running order, but I still have to touch up the paint:

If I can find where I packed the others away, I'll work on them, too.

But at the same time I worked on mass producing these, I decided to do what I could to upgrade the cardboard H36s I did in 1965. Here's one where I got a certain way with removing the cardboard sides and attaching them to a newly-built wood sub body:

The biggest obstacle to finishing these is finding either plastic or wood T-section shapes for the side ribs.