More AHM Ore Cars

More or less as an experiment, I found an AHM LS&I ore car on eBay, which claimed to have Kadees and metal wheels. I was wondering if the guy who worked on it had done anything like what I've been doing on these cars. Here's how it arrived:

It wasn't quite what I was hoping for. The "Kadees" turned out to be something like McHenry, the earliest version with the plastic spring fingers that wear out very quickly. And the coupler boxes had been CAed into the original AHM truck-mounted coupler pockets. The original builder did in fact paint the truck frames -- an enormous plus -- and also painted the black plastic underframe pieces, and the metal weights. A very good start. There were also the metal wheels.

So it was back to the LF&NW shops to bring things up to snuff. I tossed the plastic plugs that held the trucks in -- screws are really needed to adjust the play in the trucks for decent operation. I inserted sprue material into the mounting holes for drilling #50 and tapping 2-56. Also, I didn't mention this in my last post, but to mount Kadee boxes on the underframe, you need to shim beneath the end sill with .020 styrene to keep the coupler boxes level. The AHM trucks broke as soon as I tried to remove the metal wheels.

I touched up the paint and painted the sideframes of new trucks, as well as the metal wheels. Neal M asked in a comment on my last post what kind of trucks I use. In general, I use whatever AAR cast steel trucks are in the junk box. On this car, I used one old Roundhouse plastic sideframe and one even older metal truck with real springs. You really can't tell the difference once they're painted.

Here's the upgraded underframe. It's had a few test runs, but I haven't started weathering it yet.

My conclusion is that AHM ore cars turn out remarkably well with an evening's work and can be made to run reliably on a modern layout. I recognize that the LS&I didn't have cars exactly like these, but on the other hand, this is an example of how much fun vintage cars can be on a layout. Some weathering on this car will help blend things in, too. So I sent for another AHM ore car on eBay. Here's the box, which is in remarkably good shape for something maybe 50 years old:

The end of the box shows the price as of the 1960s, $2.49. It also shows what road names were available in the early runs. I think AHM added some other road names later. (The B&LE car I found and talked about in my last post must have been a later addition, for instance.) A scan of an ad I found on the web shows that these early cars were being advertised at least as of 1970.

I'm actually quite pleased with how these cars have turned out. Bachmann has been bringing back some old Tyco and AHM cars, but so far they haven't done these. With upgraded trucks and coupler mounts, plus more prototypical paint, they'd be a good addition to their line, except they'd probably want $30 per car.