Help! Still trying to find short gondolas/wagons

[thor]

I'm trying to find a source for 4 wheel 'trucks' like Thomas' Troublesome Trucks. I entered a search and got three listings for the following:-
6-19454 Pennsylvania Flat Car with Gondola
- but none of them offered any pictures and I'd like to find out more. Is this a dummy load or a real working wagon, does it have functional couplers? If anyone has one I'd appreciate a picture or a link to a picture if you know of any, please? I'm not interested in the flatcar just the short wagon and I'd like to know of a source of these too. I looked at the Ameritrains site but they are a bit too crude for my taste and too expensive if I have to retrofit couplers. I know short lines and mines used to have ore cars and little 4 wheel flatcars to carry ties on and such MOW items, so I'm surprised no one makes any. I'm hoping maybe RMT will eventually because these short 4 wheel wagons are so much fun to do switching and yard work with, They are much less likely to derail when given the sort of good hard smack needed to make them roll through sets of switches to the destination siding.

[brianel027]

Thor, the closest item I know of that has been made are the short Kickapoo Valley train cars from the Lionel set of 1972-73. There's a very short 4-wheel gondola and a short manual dump car, both with dummy coupers and plastic wheel sets.

I bought a couple of huge boxes full of these cars years ago., and have redone them. Metal wheel sets are easily added and you can fashion operating couplers to go on them with some tinkering... the Weaver ones work, with some modification.

I like these dump cars and have fashioned an operating mechanism todump them. I add weight to the underside of the chassis and give them a good paint/decal job. HO scale decals work good here because of the small space available on the car chassis. I put the heralds on the dump bin. I've done up these cars in NS, Conrail, PC, and CSX. The gondolas are a little easier to decal. You can use S scale data sets along with HO scale hearlds.

I don't have any photos of these cars I've done or I'd put them up here for you to see. At shows, people have told me they really like the cars and never paid any attention to the Kickapoo cars until they see my versions.

I might have a few extra original gondolas left but I'd have to look.

[kpolak]

How about these?

http://www.justrains.com/klinehmpg.htm

OR

http://www.grandtline.com/model_railroad/rolling_stock_and_locos.htm 

 

Kurt

[thor]

Thanks guys. Those Grandt line ones sure are different, they'd be excellent for a mine, yup Brianel I wanted to do what you said too but its the short gondolas I want to find. I'll try a few local stores.

[billbarman]

what i did was take the face off the troublesome truck and painted it black, it looks alright.

[RS3hostler]

Atlas Industrial Rail used to make 'shorty' ore cars, but they were dual-bogie not 4-wheelers. I have one in flat black and one in tuscan red. The cars look like small wooden hoppers and have no markings on them. Currently, Industrial Rail is offering short skeleton logging cars. They have 4 different roads to choose from.

The idea about taking the faces off the "Troublesome Trucks" is pretty clever. I think however that they might overwhelm my Atlas stock. And it's no good trying to import British goods wagons; I believe their O-scale uses a different gauge.

I agree the shorty cars can be fun to run, and they would look great behind Lionel's Dockside Switcher (the 0-6-0T). Let's hope RMT or some other company heeds the call.

Henry

[lionelsoni]

British O gauge is 33 millimeters for "fine scale" modeling, but 32 millimeters or 1 1/4 inches (31.75 millimeters) for anything else.  The scale is likely to be 1/43.5 (7 millimeters/foot).

[Anonymous]

  I believe K-line has what you are looking for. I believe they have scale couplers. I do not know if they are sold individualy or only in sets with engine or handcar.