Gidday, Dived into my box of second hand, "to be refurbished" rolling stock for a project on a quiet winters night project, as you do, and pulled out what I thought, at first glance, an assembled Athearn BB 40 foot steel box car, which needed some TLC. The first thing I noticed was that it had actual sprung trucks and on the one piece under frame, which is virtually identical to the Athearn one,has a moulded insignia inscribed with "OK" and has also "Crown" ,"Hong Kong" and No C150.
The steel weight is larger than an Athearn one but with "a lick of a file" the parts are interchangeable, and similar style of manufacture. I had a look on HOSeeker, there is a reference to "OK Herkime, but I'm not convinced they're the same thing.
I'm not about to loose sleep over this,but am curious.
Cheers, the Bear.
"One difference between pessimists and optimists is that while pessimists are more often right, optimists have far more fun."
"JaBear" I'm not about to loose sleep over this,but am curious.
Dr. Frankendiesel aka Scott Running BearSpace Mouse for president!15 year veteran fire fighterCollector of Apple //e'sRunning Bear EnterprisesHistory Channel Club life member.beatus homo qui invenit sapientiam
I have a number of Crown cars I got when I was a teenager, back in the early 1960s. At the time, they were a real bargain, considerably cheaper than comparable Blue-Box kits, but with nice detail and paint jobs. My collection includes box cars, tankers and log cars.
The trucks have plastic wheels, and, unfortunately, cylindrical axles rather than the pointed ones found in replacement metal wheelsets. I've used a Dremel (very carefully) to alter the truck frames to take pointed axles. This works on some of them, but I've ended up replacing the trucks on others.
As I recall, the coupler pockets had very thin center pins for the horn-hooks they came with, and I ended up removing the original pockets and replacing them with Kadee draft gear boxes.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
I remember the Crown line very well (and it is NOT to be confused with the superb Crown brass locomotives of the same era -- the same name was used for the most expensive and very cheapest).
It was actually brought in by Mantua/Tyco but "silently" -- the Mantua name was not used to sell the product. The freight cars were all knock offs of Athearn and made in Hong Kong. I recall for example the four truck flat car was just like Athearn's in appearance (and excessive height compared to the prototype). The Deep Rock tank car also looked just like Athearns (I do not have one at hand but I almost wonder if the car's number was the same). For all I know the parts interchange.
The paint jobs were not bad, no worse than Athearn's, the detail was not bad, but while the trucks were sprung (as were, of course, at one time, Athearn's) the flanges were those cheese cutter things and they did not roll particularly well. Sometimes a bit of flash would cause them to wobble. The one good feature was that they used real screws to fasten the trucks so a replacement was not a difficult task even for a kid.
As a rule the Crown cars were under weight. It was also a bit more of a challenge to swap out the horn hook couplers for KDs -- although I suspect that was a moot point for Crown's target market of kids who wanted to add to their "train set." I had some Crown cars where the couplers drooped down and there was no easy way to correct that.
The big advantage to Crown cars was the price. I saw them at many hobby shops back in the 1960s and the price was invariably 99 cents. The packaging was a flat sheet of cardstock and a plastic "bubble" around the car, so they could not be stacked up but rather sold off of a peg board. The downside was that now there was no box to store the cars. Fortunately that was also an era when smoke shops gave away excellent cigar boxes (some of them, all wood!) and also checks from the bank came in very sturdy boxes that were large enough for a 40' car.
What is funny is that at the time, an Athearn kit box car might be $1.79 to $2.29. So the Crown price advantage while substantial as a percentage of overall cost, was not all that huge in absolute terms.
This is OT but speaking of low prices, a bit before Crown cars came out, Kurtz Kraft had 40' boxcar kits for 79 cents -- without trucks and with dummy couplers, but still ....-- in a simple plastic bag, also usually displayed on a peg board. Those were actually pretty nice cars but not easy to assemble given the cements we had available to us back then. In some ways they predated the Red Caboose and Intermountain quality plastic kits with separate grab irons and ladders, more realistic door mountings, and some interesting lettering schemes. But if the car was, say, black, such as my Central of Georgia car, then it came in black plastic with the lettering and markings added, so it had a plastic sheen.
From time to time at swap meets I see "new" Crown cars (can't really say new in the box because there is no box) selling for surprisingly high prices. I guess the packaging made them unlikely to last long in storage. But I also suspect that at swap meets when you see cardboard trays of "Athearn" and trainset quality cars being sold for a couple of bucks that there could be Crown cars in the mix and you'd never know it.
Both Crown and Kurtz Kraft were emblematic of a difficult problem the LHS faced back then, one that MR editor Linn Westcott fretted about often in his editorials: with the sudden influx of cheap goods, often imports but some domestic due to injection molded plastic technology, a square yard of LHS display space was not going to offer the hobby shop owner much return on investment.
Think about it. If on any given day two dozen kids came in the shop and each bought a Crown car, and two dozen adults came in and each one bought a Kurtz Kraft car -- and how many LHS owners would kill to have 48 paying customers a day in their stores! -- the owner would clear, what? $12? $15? Westcott realized that there had to be more expensive goods for the owner to survive.
Dave Nelson
I remember seeng OK Herkimer ads in the model mags back in the 50's but most of them were for Santa Fe F7 and streamlined aluminum passenger cars. I belive they were actual aluminum extrusions with windows punched out. Don't remember seeing any freight cars though, but then that was a long time ago.
-Bob
Life is what happens while you are making other plans!
Gidday Gentlemen, Many thanks for your replies.
Mr Beasley, Yes I had noticed those wheels, I probably just turn down the pizza cutter flanges first and see how they run, though as Dave Nelson mentions in his comprehensive in put, "....they did not roll particularly well", so will attempt your fix. ( I'll probably end up kicking my self for not just replacing the wheel sets from the word go!!)
Certainly didn't mind you going off topic either Dave, a bit of history doesn't go amiss, and though I'd never heard of them before, if I ever find a Kurtz Kraft kit I know who to call.
farrella Bob, not much wrong with your memory, here's links to the 1957 OK brochure.....
http://hoseeker.net/OKlists/OKbrochure1957pg1.jpg
http://hoseeker.net/OKlists/OKbrochure1957pg2.jpg
Thanks again for your time, it is much appreciated,
On my Crown cars and older Athearns with sprung trucks, the springs have sometimes proven to be a problem. (Gee, you'd think they could make things that last more than 60 years, wouldn't you?) I've ended up gluing the trucks together. Some are so loose that they would drop the wheelsets right out while running. I look for complete trucks in bargain bins because I know I have some to replace.
Thanks Bear, that is exactly what I remembered (except for the freight cars!).
I also had one of the KurtzKraft box cars and it was the most detailed model on my layout.
I just picked a couple of the Crown HO Scale Trains blisterpaks as a little nostalgia and couldn't find anything from Google about them - kept referencing CMT O-scale products - until I came across your article when set my mind at ease. However, what means "OT" and "LHS" acronyms you used?
JusTrainsHowever, what means "OT" and "LHS" acronyms you used?
Hello,
I also sometimes get tripped up by obscure abbreviations and acronyms.
LHS has been used in the model RR world to denote the Local Hobby Shop. Sometimes refered to as the B&M shop as in Brick and Mortar.
OT is a clue that the conversation is 'off topic' or veering into new territory, not to be confused with OP which is refering to the Original Poster.
Good Luck, Ed
Page 2 of the Jan. 1964 issue of the MR magazine
See:
Tyco Forum
Model Railroad News
The boxcar, tank car, flat car and caboose were copies of Athearn. The gondola was from Rivarossi or Roco. According to my research, these five products were passed on to AHM and then to Bachmann in 1971. The models below are modified. See my blog posts. 4683
The blue is a late Athearn blue box (modified). The crown boxcar (original) looks just like the very early Athearn.
I think "OK" is a Hong Kong mold manufacturer.
Now here is a thread I did not expect to see revived all these years later. But the actual images of Crown/OK ads and the models and their packaging help make the thread a more complete discussion of this perhaps obscure sidelight into HO history. For all those who object to reviving old threads, this shows why it can be the best idea.
And it was nice nostaligia to see the old cardboard with blister pack again. When I was a kid Crown's pricing really helped expand my little roster of freight cars. I was at an NMRA divisional meet Sunday and was pleased to see how many 12 to 18 year olds were there. It must be depressing for them to see all these wonderful products of today that they cannot hope to acquire except as a rare birthday or holiday present. At the risk of being a classic geezer, "in my day, sonny boy" if there was something nice that we could not afford at least we could assume that it would still be offered for sale in five or ten years when we COULD afford it (Mantua metal steam locomotives; Athearn diesels; etc).
This is a very interesting thread that I haven't seen before. I have a lot of old stuff and I have came across some cars that were almost Athearn, but not quite! I've found some Lindberg, some Kurtz Kraft, so I very well may have some of these as well.
The printing was much better on those cars than the Tyco/Mantua line!
Two points 1) In all my train watching since 1964 or so, age 12, I can not recall seeing a compartmented tank car. They seem much more common on model pikes than real life. I am guessing they were used to ship multiple products to small distributors - maybe Midwest or West Coast? I lived on the East Coast. 2) Was there a prototype for the eight axle flat car? It looks like something from General Steel Castings, with the entire car being one steel casting (or welded from another source ?). I guessed PRR, but on checking, it looks like no joy.
http://prr.railfan.net/diagrams/PRRdiagrams.html
reomoved
BEAUSABRE1) In all my train watching since 1964 or so, age 12, I can not recall seeing a compartmented tank car.
They'd look like this without the continuous shell wall:
Triple_Tank UTLX by Edmund, on Flickr
You can see the paired, double rows of rivets here denoting the internal tank dividers:
58001 by John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library, on Flickr
8696 001 by John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library, on Flickr
BEAUSABRE 2) Was there a prototype for the eight axle flat car?
I can't say where the flat car originated from. The Pennsy had an F34 that looked somewhat close:
http://prr.railfan.net/diagrams/PRRdiagrams.html?diag=F34.gif&sel=flat&sz=sm&fr=
I seem to recall seeing a similar New York Central flat like the Athearn model but can't recall where I saw it. The Athearn model might be loosely based on this SP 200 ton model:
http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/11/southern-pacifics-200-ton-flat-cars.html
The 3-compartment tank car definitely has prototypes including some in the Deep Rock paint scheme. Ditto the four truck flatcar, but don't expect to see these cars now. Take a look at the 1937 Car Builder's Cyclopedia, or various editions of the Railroad Prototype Cyclopedia. Thus is also true by the way for many HO cars from the 1950s: check 1937 and older "Cycs."
For practical purposes the Athearn and Crown four axle flatcar sits much higher than the prototype. If you had very wide radius curves and added some weight, I think you could modify the model's bolsters to lower the height. It might also be possible to use the basic flatcar body and use 3 axle Buckeye type trucks, the result would resemble some military flatcars.
AMENDED POST -- A four truck flatcar that resembles the Athearn/Crown model except it is nowhere near as tall) is in the 1931 Car Builder's Cyclopedia: C&NW 48053. It is listed as a 200 ton car
The 1943 Car Builder's Cyclopedia still shows that C&NW car and also shows a Pennsylvania Railroad car of basically similar appearance, and it is listed as a 187 ton car. Both were 44' long. What the 1943 yclopedia does show, however, was that heavy duty flatcars increasingly just had heavy duty 3 axle buckeye trucks rather than the complex double bolster of the C&NW and Pennsy prototypes (and the Athearn/Crown model). I suspect those cars were retired before most of us on these forums became informed and alert train watchers and modelers
As to the 3 dome tank car that Athearn/Crown offered, it too was shown in the 1931 Cyclopedia and in the Deep Rock paint scheme that both Athearn and Crown cataloged. There were other 3 dome tank cars but they had a different apperance. That Cyclopedia also shows, 2, 4, and 6 dome tank cars. The 6 dome car was made to carry wine! So why multiple domes (meaning, multiple compartments separate from each other under one tank car shell)? Well think about it. A bulk "oil" dealer needed to get, yes, oil, but also gasoline for the growing automobile and truck markets, perhaps diesel for early diesel trucks, and unquestionably kerosene for their more rural customers who might not yet have electric lights in the 1930s. I have also read that multiple compartment tank cars might have served as "less than carload lots" cars, meaning one small dealer would get the contents of one compartment, another dealer might take the other two or just one of the two, and so on.
Trucks and refrigeration (for shipping wine) took away most of these markets by the time most of us were train watchers. That's why they do not look familiar. But they were real cars and the trainwatchers at the time Athearn brought out the originals in the early 1950s would have seen them.
DN
BEAUSABREIn all my train watching since 1964 or so, age 12, I can not recall seeing a compartmented tank car. They seem much more common on model pikes than real life. I am guessing they were used to ship multiple products to small distributors - maybe Midwest or West Coast? I lived on the East Coast. ...
The only one I remember seeing was a 3 dome tank car on the NYC Putnam Division in suburban New York in about 1965. There was a small chemical plant on the line.
The reason for the compartmented wine cars...most table wines are blends of several types of wine. The cars transported wine from California to the bottling plants in Chicago and NYC where the various types of wine were blended and bottled. It changed in the mid 50s when Gallo began shipping its bottled wine across the country in then-new insulated and DF equipped boxcars.