I picked up a Micro-Trains Penn Central depressed center flat car today. This was an August release, so it has the new medium-profile wheels that roll well on code 55 track. The car itself is a foob, but is a reasonable stand-in for a PC Lot 125-F flat, a two-car class. The 766058 is one of those two cars, and appears at the bottom of page 90 in your Penn Central Color Guide if you'd like to follow along. The picture in the book is from December 1978, and so is probably representative of how the car might have looked in the summer of 1980 (my era). The main spotting difference between the Micro-Trains car and the prototype is in the brakewheels. The prototype had one bracket-mounted wheel whereas the model has dual straight shaft-mounted wheels. I chose not to change these out.
The car comes with a generator that looks an awful lot like the Westinghouse generator load in the Color Guide photo.
This is the car from the box:
It needs some TLC. First off, the swirly plastic of the generator load doesn't look good. It may look "weathered" to first approximation, but the generator loads I see with depressed center flatcar photos (including the one of 766058) are invariably spotless... because they're new. The other biggie that needs to be fixed is the green wooden decks on the flatcar.
I added the ACI labels to the approximate location they had on the prototype (although they were bracket-mounted on the real car). I could not find matching lube stencils for the prototype. I painted the decks a concrete color and then washed a few acrylic washes over them. I then airbrushed the car with varying colors such as a homemade grime and some rust on the trucks. The generator got a shot of Testor's Aircraft Dark Gray, and I highlighted the conduits with a silver Sharpie.
The one thing the prototype really shows that the model doesn't have are load retainers. In the photo, there are a number of load restraints spreading out in a fan pattern front and back, but I figured four (0.015" music wire) restraints would be adequate to represent the prototype. It really makes the load look even heavier, but more importantly, the load looks
secure.
Here's the finished product:
This was an enjoyable half-day project.
