Choosing right freight cars for specific time frame

[jasperofzeal]

Hello to all.  I have four Bowser 70 ton open covered hoppers, HO scale.  The roadnames are Northern Pacific, Santa Fe, Burlington Northern and SLSF.  My modeling "years" or era is between early 80's to late 90's.  I know it's kind of a large range to model, but I was trying to keep up with how real railroads change and although I can, most model makers can't, so my focus has changed.  My question is this:  I noticed the bowser cars have high brake wheels, can I use these cars for my specified time frame?  Do I need to "modernize" them by lowering the brake wheel or can I just use them as is?  Should I repaint over the original road name and add a newer one?  I ask this because the model also comes with friction bearing trucks, two roadnames that probably don't exist anymore (NP and SLSF), the high brake wheels that I mentioned and reporting marks that say "new 7 49".  I assume that means the prototype car was built July of 1949.  I want to know if I should keep them or send them off to ebay.  The reason I bought these models was because I LOVE to assemble kits.  I was really pleased and totally enjoyed building one of these kits.  If you haven't assembled one of these or one of Life Like's P2K Covered hoppers, you should try.  Anyway, as for my question, any help would be appreciated.  Thanks.

[beegle55]

Well, the decision really lies in your hands. You have to ask yourself if it is worth the hassle of e-baying it, or should you just keep it and let your prototypical standards slack just a bit. I would probably keep it if I didn't have too much invested in it and I didn't have a major problem with putting it on the layout being a bit out of era. Heck, as far as CSX goes, they probably are still running hoppers from 1949! Good luck.

 -beegle55

[jrbernier]

  The decision is yours.  From your description, these are the open side ACF covered hoppers with the large square loading hatches?  The build date of 1949 sounds about right.  There is a basic '40 year' rule for rolling stock.  It either needs a complete rebuilding(frame) or needs to banned from interchange service(cannot run on another railroad).  With this in mind, 1989 is the 'bingo' date when a decision had to be made about the status of the car.  In the 80's, one would still see cars still in their original NP or SLSF paint schemes(the SLSF was just merged into the BN).  By the 90's, these older cars would start their journey to the scrap yard or be rebuilt if it was worth it.  I have not seen any of the ACF cars for some time, and the only examples I have seen 'rebuilt' were some that were converted to to 'ballast' cars with most of the roof opened up and ballast doors replacing the usual discharge gear.  The C&NW had some of these - Eastern Car Works makes a model of this car.  Here is a link to a photo of the car - note the special ballast doors.

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/117-2200

Jim Bernier