Athearn November Announcements

[asarge]

November is out. New one of the Bilevel and Trilevels and some FMC Plug Doors.

http://www.athearn.com/newsletter/102519/07_N_89ft_Autorack_102519.pdf
http://www.athearn.com/newsletter/102519/08_N_FMC_Superior_Plug_Box_102519.pdf

[C855B]

...Trilevels...

Oh my aching wallet.    Right smack in the middle of my modeling period and my favored roads and that a car factory is in my layout plans. [...sigh...]

[daniel_leavitt2000]

Sweet - Stone Container! These were always on the Boston Line.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

You know what I love about Athearn's announcement PDFs?

That they preserve the vector art for the cars.

So you can read the data, like this.

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But then you also can realize that they're cheating with some of the data.

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Either way, I'm not really complaining.

[nkalanaga]

Yes, I've noticed that the lube plates, at least, are often the same on every car in a run.  I have several where the built dates are later than the new/service date in the capacity block.

Fortunately I can't read 1 inch N scale lettering without a magnifier!

[milw156]

I picked up SCL and N&W trilevels at Trainfest. the SCL came with ACI placards in a bag under the car to be applied by the end user. There were none in the N&W car. pretty nice models, although if you want to run it loaded, the autos will cost more than the cars!

[nkalanaga]

MILW156: I suspect that might be the case with the prototype as well!  Autorack derailments are expensive...

[nkalanaga]

Question:  How common were the UP "plain brown" racks?  I seem to remember them being yellow, with the shield, even on brown flats.  Of course, I didn't pay much attention to UP cars in the 60s and 70s, so my memory might be wrong...

Finding pictures of a specific road's autoracks is difficult, to say the least.  Most sites list them by the flatcar number, and TTX numbers seem to randomly assigned.

[C855B]

Brown is definitely correct for the open-sided era. It would take a bit of research to discern when the jump to yellow was, but I think there's a clue somewhere in this well-worn example of an early sheathed car: http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=5003874. Judging from the car number, it was probably a prototype, likely mid-'70s.

[learmoia]

I would say 1974-1975... (there was at least one group of enclosed racks painted brown with Yellow TTX flats.

Apart from Vertipacs, Stack Pacs and prototypes in 1968-1974


The first fully enclosed rack (in mass production) was 1974, and the Safe-Pac was 1974 (the yellow UP car shown above is a Safe-Pac) with mass production 1975.

~Ian

[Missaberoad]

Took a quick look at the Morning Sun guides and vol 2 shows a brown enclosed car in 1975 and a yellow open car in 1971 so it seems there was some crossover...

[nkalanaga]

Thank you, everybody.  Guess I'll have to order one, since it is correct.  Hopefully somebody will do Ryan's yellow car as well, eventually.