Athearn/Roundhouse British Columbia Boxcar

I recently discovered an Athearn/Roundhouse BC Rail boxcar in the late scheme at MB Klein and ordered one. Here it is with wheels and trucks painted, new couplers, and graffiti:

It came with post-2010 conspicuity stripes. In the areas where the new graffiti covered the stripes, I replaced them with new stripes from Smokebox Graphics.

I was curiouis to see how close the model was to any prototype. I found that I'd shot two BCOL cars in the 100300 series at various times:

However, I don't have anyu shots from the 100400 series that this car is in. A check of the 100400 series on rrpicturarchives.net shows that these cars are smooth sided, unlike the 100300s, but they have one plug door and one sliding door.

Then I had a flashbvack. The tooling on these models is Roundhouse straight from the mid 1970s -- I did a couple in SP at that time when they were still Roundhouse kits. However, the factory paint at that time was so poor that I always just painted undecorated cars myself.

Thee cars sorta-kinda represented SP cars that I saw pretty frequently at that time. I think they hauled wine from Napa-Sonoma.

So this is quite interesting -- 45 year old tooling, with a paint job much improved from what was available in the mid 1970s. The only changes to the 1970s model are the brakewheel, improved trucks, metal wheels, brake parts, and the McHenry couplers (which still have to be swapped out for Kadees).

Although the car is just an approximation, I think it still works at normal layout distance, especially with the improved factory paint, along with graffiti.