How do the Con Cor passenger cars compare to the IHC cars? I seem to recall hearing somewhere that they are one and the same.
Well, hobo, the short answer is that with one exception, the IHC and Con-Cor cars are different.
As for how they compare, it depends on which IHC cars you want to compare to which Con-Cor cars, since both companies have had different suppliers over the years. Some recent Con-Cor cars are vastly superior to all IHC cars ever made, while some older ones are somewhat comparable. That is tied to the product lines' history. If you would like a specific answer, let us know which cars you want to compare.
Warning: A history lesson follows. Feel free to skip to the next post...
Con-Cor has had a number of types of plastic passenger cars over the years, with varying quality and varying levels of detail. They range from late 1800s-era wood-sided cars (tooled by Pola or Pocher) through their 85-foot streamlined cars with corrugations/fluting to their smooth-sided 72-foot streamlined cars and wrapping up with their more recent highly-detailed cars based on the Pennsy's short heavyweight P54/MP54 cars. The well-detailed articulated streamlined trains Con-Cor released over the past ten or so years have nothing in common with anything IHC produced.
IHC had two major groups of passenger cars over the years, with the first being a series of streamlined and heavyweight cars using tooling made by Rivarossi in Italy that were identical to IHC predecessor AHM's cars. IHC sold these, briefly in red-orange IHC boxes. These were designed and their tooling cut over a period from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, and were generally considered well-detailed for their time.
When IHC and Rivarossi parted ways in the 1990s, they had another bunch of streamlined and heavyweight cars tooled up by someone else. These last cars are generally considered to be less well-detailed and, by many, to be pretty crude for the time they were released. These cars were sold at first in the same red-orange boxes as the Rivarossi cars, then later (and more commonly) in the pale blue boxes.
As I said up top, Con-Cor's passenger cars are completely different from the IHC cars, with an exception -- Con-Cor released several boxed HO passenger train sets in the 1980s. These were marketed as collector's sets. The sets Con-Cor released with streamlined cars used their own 85-foot corrugated/fluted streamlined cars. The sets with heavyweight cars used Rivarossi cars made with the same tooling used by the cars that IHC was offering at the time.
An example of one of these sets would be the Con-Cor "Cardinal's Train", which had a Rivarossi NYC Hudson pulling a heavyweight passenger set painted red to match a special train the NYC ran in the 1920s for a meeting of religious leaders.
Other examples would be a military hospital train in olive drab, with the same consist as the Cardinal's train, and an "Alton Limited" set with the same cars in maroon, pulled by a Rivarossi Pacific.
So, unless the cars were included in one of those sets (Con-Cor didn't sell them seprately), Con-Cor and IHC passenger cars are different things.
-Fritz Milhaupt, Publications Editor, Pere Marquette Historical Society, Inc.http://www.pmhistsoc.org
I have owned passenger cars from both IHC and Con Cor.
Quality and detail are similar. But, I much prefer IHC over Con Cor. On my Con Cor cars, they came equipped with truck mounted couplers which did not perform well, so i converted them to body mounted couplers, and the project was problematic.
Rich
Alton Junction
I have a set of the 72 con cor stream liners. I used the kadee kit to truck the couplers and they run great. Zero derailments.
Jim
I believe the common belief that the IHC cars were re-runs of the old AHM/Rivarossi cars is incorrect. I think it comes from the fact that Rivarossi made cars sold by AHM many years back, before offering the cars under their own name. Perhaps people confuse the AHM and IHC names.I have a number of IHC cars and none of them were the same as the corresponding Rivarossi car, or an AHM car made by Rivarossi.
IMHO the IHC cars aren't as good as the AHM/Rivarossi cars in detail or riding quality, although the IHC cars did have a very good interior insert made of several plastic pieces molded in colors, so they weren't just all one color like you normally see in an interior.
Well, if you compare the Con-Cor 72 foot Smooth Side cars to IHC Smooth Side cars, I would definetly say that the IHC Smooth Side cars are better, and not only because they look better since they are 85 foot instead of 72 foot. But if you compare Con-Cor 85 foot Corrugated Side cars to IHC Corrugated Side cars, I would say that the Con-Cor Corrugated Side cars are better because they simply look better. But the disadvantage is, that there are no interiors being offered for the Con-Cor cars, while they are available for IHC cars. I would say if you plan to install interiors and passengers, take the IHC cars, but if you don´t mind a little bit of cutting, you can take the Con-Cor cars as well in case of the 85 Corrugated Side cars. But if you have the choice between IHC Corrugated/Smooth Side/Heavyweight cars, Con-Cor Corrugated/Smooth Side cars and Rivarossi/AHM Corrugated/Smooth Side/Heavyweight cars, I strongly recommend the Rivarossi/AHM cars because of their overall better looks and more detail. Also if you are too lazy to build interior kits, Rivarossi/AHM is the way to go if the one-piece-interiors are already installed. And although they have only one color in contrast to the IHC interiors, you can still paint them as you like. I myself am also often too lazy to build something, but sometimes kits can be very fun. For example I equipped a complete Roundhouse Palace Car train with IHC interiors and it worked out very well. Was a lot of cutting and arranging (it looks totally unique now) but couldn´t look better now as the train is finished and you see the different colors when the interior lighting is turned on. Currently I´m also equipping a brass train with IHC interiors which is also working well. So in case you prefer Con-Cor cars over IHC, it should not be a problem to install IHC into Con-Cor cars if desired.