Virginian Coal Hopper - Tyco upgrade

So who says if it's not prototypical it has to look so?

Our grandfather had an HO Scale layout which was basically an oval on 4 4x8 sheets of plywood. There were 4 yards which were basic ladder stub tracks each yard reached from the rear part of the loop had 5 tracks while the front two had ten tracks. Inside the oval was a loop which allowed you to do a figure 8.

While it certainly wasn't what I strive for in my layout, I couldn't wait as a child to go over and run his trains. While I credit my dad with my main train bug, grandpa certainly helped it along in a big way.

Most of his trains had a theme. Who can remember the Tyco candy cars or Pepsi & Coke tank cars? Well grandpa had a train for each of those. He also had some unit trains which were assigned just one type of car or one railroad. That's where the Virginian cars come in I fondly remember the cool looking silver hoppers.

Now fast forward 25 years and grandpa has been gone for over a decade and I have a model railroad but I strive for a very prototypical feel to mine.

I wanted something to remember grandpa on the layout but I wanted something that fit in. I had the Virginian cars sitting in a box for about the past 30 plus years. I figured why not them?

So then it began, at first it was going to be a quick change out couplers upgrade wheels weather and away we go.

Well then I began to look at it and thought well the trucks don't look good. So in came some Atlas 70T trucks, well if I'm going to upgrade trucks perhaps I should get rid of those awful stir-ups, so in came Detail Associates stir-ups.

Well if I'm going to do that lets shave off the the brake wheel platform and replace that with a left over locomotive photo-etched cab step. If that's done then we definitely need and upgrade brake wheel. If were going to upgrade that then I need to get rid of the horrible molded on air tank reservoir and valve on the end. So I looked thru the scrap box and found some brake parts from an old Athearn Impact car set.

Well now I've gone that far so, there is no way I can leave on those molded on grab irons and bracing. So in comes some Detail Associates ladders and .012 brass wire.

Once that's all done I needed to tackle weight even with the Atlas trucks she was still under weight. I had the Tyco weights but did not like how they attach on the underside of the slope sheet, where they can clearly be viewed from the side. So I decided to reuse the weights but I installed them on the interior slope sheet. I then made a new slope sheet. It's sloppy and not neat and tidy but I added some Micro-mark decal rivet lines, and painted it to match the car. Once installed it hides the weight and once weathered up I don't think you will notice the small gaps around the edges much if at all.

I trimmed down the original center sill but retained it after filling in the truck pin location with styrene then drilled and tapped it to mount the new trucks. This work actually ended up lowering the ride height of the car and make it look better in my opinion.

When I first started out I was going to just weather the car, then I thought about printing my own decals on the printer and then I decided after all the work that I wanted it to look good all around. So I did some research and found out the Virginian actually had small 2 bay hoppers for ballast service but painted gray.

Further research found that William Mosteller had decals for these cars available from the Great Decals and E-bay sites.

The data is correct for a 70T coal hopper and since the car is fictional the car number is made up without much rhyme or reasoning for it aside from the real ballast hoppers were four digits.

Oh well not bad for about and 45 minutes to an hour of work per car for modifications, add in another 30 minutes for decaling the entire car. So far I've done two and I will wait for more details to come in to complete the remaining eight cars.

I think it came out pretty good for a quick and fun upgrade.