Updated Ulrich GS Gondola

Ulrich HO kits were high-end models in the 1950s, expensive, hard to find, and in comparison to Athearn, hard to build. They were out of my league at the time. Since then, I've run across a few at swap meets. This Utah Coal Route car was one of several I picked up at a meet and have been converting to contemporary operating standards.

This is how it looked when I brought it home from the swap. The pieces were all there, but:

One coupler was completely missing, and nothing was holding the other in place.

I tossed the one old coupler.

I decided to mill out the ends of the underframes of all three GS gons that I found using the cutting disk in my Dremel to let me install Kadee 148s:

Then I installed the Kadee 148 boxes with CA. When this dried, I used the mounting holes in the boxes as guides to drill #50 and tap 2-56 for mounting screws. Below is the finished car with paint touched up. I used plastic trucks from the junk box with Kadee 33 inch wheels. A 70-year-old model, it can now run with DCC and sound equipped locos and good-quality made-in-China freight cars.

According to Don Strack's Utah Rails site, the Utah Coal Route had 2,000 cars of a somewhat different design from the Ulrich model. "The Utah Coal Route name was in reality used only on these 2,000 cars and was a marketing scheme for coal mined in Utah and shipped to destinations on the Union Pacific."

These cars lasted to about 1960 and were replaced by hoppers lettered for the Utah Railway.