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Walthers Hideous Tank Car

Garth Groff <sarahsan@...>
 

Friends,

After a long break for other interests, I have returned to trains and rejoined this group. It will be great to become reacquainted with old friends, and make some new ones.

So I'm sitting here looking at a Walthers tank car. When I cleared out my Athearn-quality cars years back I kept this car. I figured it would be good to have a dozen or so "expendable" cars that guests or kids could run on my layout and not cause me to have a coronary if they were damaged, and at that time I was building a portable layout to take to a now-defunct train show I often attended. Besides, it is a Sinclair car, and my sweetheart is a Sinclair by descent. She always liked this car, and it never hurts to score points with one's spouse.

I know the tank scales out to about 11K gallons and the dome is oversized. What intrigues me is the underframe and tank saddles. Is the underframe close to any prototype, especially one not done with more quality by the IM or Proto cars? I'm wondering if anyone has ever considered shimming the saddles and dropping a more prototypical tank onto this underframe to get something a bit different. Detailing on the frame itself is a bit clunky, but the corner steps, and some of the rods and piping, could be replaced by wire for a layout-quality car.

Thoughts? Ideas? Raspberries?

Yours Aye,


Garth Groff
Richard Hendrickson
 

On Mar 28, 2014, at 11:12 AM, Garth Groff <sarahsan@...> wrote:

Friends,

After a long break for other interests, I have returned to trains and 
rejoined this group. It will be great to become reacquainted with old 
friends, and make some new ones.

So I'm sitting here looking at a Walthers tank car. When I cleared out 
my Athearn-quality cars years back I kept this car. I figured it would 
be good to have a dozen or so "expendable" cars that guests or kids 
could run on my layout and not cause me to have a coronary if they were 
damaged, and at that time I was building a portable layout to take to a 
now-defunct train show I often attended. Besides, it is a Sinclair car, 
and my sweetheart is a Sinclair by descent. She always liked this car, 
and it never hurts to score points with one's spouse.

I know the tank scales out to about 11K gallons and the dome is 
oversized. What intrigues me is the underframe and tank saddles. Is the 
underframe close to any prototype, especially one not done with more 
quality by the IM or Proto cars? I'm wondering if anyone has ever 
considered shimming the saddles and dropping a more prototypical tank 
onto this underframe to get something a bit different. Detailing on the 
frame itself is a bit clunky, but the corner steps, and some of the rods 
and piping, could be replaced by wire for a layout-quality car.

Thoughts? Ideas? Raspberries?

First of all, Garth, welcome back.

I don’t have an example of that Walthers tank car in front of me, but my recollection (reinforced by the illustrations in the Walthers on-line catalog) is that the underframes are severely clunky and don’t even remotely resemble any prototype underframe.  And reworking that underframe into anything even vaguely prototypical would, in my opinion, require a lot more effort than would be warranted by the results.  YMMV, but if it were my model, I’d replace it with a prototypically accurate model of a Sinclair car (e.g., Proto 2000 10K AC&F Type 21). 

Richard Hendrickson
Tony Thompson
 

Garth Groff wrote:

After a long break for other interests, I have returned to trains and  rejoined this group. It will be great to become reacquainted with old  friends, and make some new ones.

      Glad to have you back with us, Garth. Many happy returns, as the saying goes.

Tony Thompson             Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705         www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, tony@...
Publishers of books on railroad history
Tim O'Connor
 

Welcome back Garth!!

And in the immortal words of Richard Hendrickson:

"The Walthers underframe sucks, like the rest of the model."

:-)

Tim O'Connor

At 3/28/2014 02:12 PM Friday, you wrote:
Friends,

After a long break for other interests, I have returned to trains and
rejoined this group. It will be great to become reacquainted with old
friends, and make some new ones.

So I'm sitting here looking at a Walthers tank car. When I cleared out
my Athearn-quality cars years back I kept this car. I figured it would
be good to have a dozen or so "expendable" cars that guests or kids
could run on my layout and not cause me to have a coronary if they were
damaged, and at that time I was building a portable layout to take to a
now-defunct train show I often attended. Besides, it is a Sinclair car,
and my sweetheart is a Sinclair by descent. She always liked this car,
and it never hurts to score points with one's spouse.

I know the tank scales out to about 11K gallons and the dome is
oversized. What intrigues me is the underframe and tank saddles. Is the
underframe close to any prototype, especially one not done with more
quality by the IM or Proto cars? I'm wondering if anyone has ever
considered shimming the saddles and dropping a more prototypical tank
onto this underframe to get something a bit different. Detailing on the
frame itself is a bit clunky, but the corner steps, and some of the rods
and piping, could be replaced by wire for a layout-quality car.

Thoughts? Ideas? Raspberries?

Yours Aye,

Garth Groff
Riverboy
 

I don't want to sound too ignorant, but exactly which Walthers tank car are you referring to? I'd like to look and see how hideous it really is.

Tod Dwyer (Ohio) 
 

From: Garth Groff
To: STMFC@...
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2014 2:12 PM
Subject: [STMFC] Walthers Hideous Tank Car
 
Friends,

After a long break for other interests, I have returned to trains and
rejoined this group. It will be great to become reacquainted with old
friends, and make some new ones.

So I'm sitting here looking at a Walthers tank car. When I cleared out
my Athearn-quality cars years back I kept this car. I figured it would
be good to have a dozen or so "expendable" cars that guests or kids
could run on my layout and not cause me to have a coronary if they were
damaged, and at that time I was building a portable layout to take to a
now-defunct train show I often attended. Besides, it is a Sinclair car,
and my sweetheart is a Sinclair by descent. She always liked this car,
and it never hurts to score points with one's spouse.

I know the tank scales out to about 11K gallons and the dome is
oversized. What intrigues me is the underframe and tank saddles. Is the
underframe close to any prototype, especially one not done with more
quality by the IM or Proto cars? I'm wondering if anyone has ever
considered shimming the saddles and dropping a more prototypical tank
onto this underframe to get something a bit different. Detailing on the
frame itself is a bit clunky, but the corner steps, and some of the rods
and piping, could be replaced by wire for a layout-quality car.

Thoughts? Ideas? Raspberries?

Yours Aye,

Garth Groff
Tim O'Connor
 

This was their tank car inherited from VARNEY! So the tooling precedes
the era of the commercial jet aircraft. :-)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/191109900168

Tim O'Connor

I don't want to sound too ignorant, but exactly which Walthers tank car are you referring to? I'd like to look and see how hideous it really is.
Tod Dwyer (Ohio)
Riverboy
 

Thanks Tim. I actually kind of forgot about this Walthers release. Yes, it would need a lot of work to make it into a much more accurate car.

Tod Dwyer (Ohio)
 

From: Tim O'Connor
To: STMFC@...
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2014 4:43 PM
Subject: Re: [STMFC] Walthers Hideous Tank Car
 
This was their tank car inherited from VARNEY! So the tooling precedes
the era of the commercial jet aircraft. :-)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/191109900168

Tim O'Connor

>I don't want to sound too ignorant, but exactly which Walthers tank car are you referring to? I'd like to look and see how hideous it really is.
>Tod Dwyer (Ohio)

Richard Hendrickson
 

On Mar 28, 2014, at 1:33 PM, Riverboy <river_dweller_ohio@...> wrote:


I don't want to sound too ignorant, but exactly which Walthers tank car are you referring to? I'd like to look and see how hideous it really is.

Tod Dwyer (Ohio)

Tod, it’s the model Walthers describes as a “36’ 10,000 gal. AC&F tank car.”  Don’t confuse this model, whose origins go way back to an even worse piece of Varney junk, with the former Life-Like Proto 2000 tank cars, now made by Walthers, which are good, prototypically accurate models of AC&F Type 21s.

Richard Hendrickson
Garth Groff <sarahsan@...>
 

Tod and friends,

This is the Walthers tank car in question: http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/910-1001 . As some people have pointed out, this is similar to the 1950s Varney tank car, later Lifelike (long before the Proto 2000 era). The Varney car I had as a youth had no rivets, and did not have near the detailing of the Walthers car. I suspect the Walthers tank is new tooling, but was dimensioned off the original Varney car. Train Miniature originally showed a similar car on their boxes. Shortly after TM was taken over by Walthers in the 1970s, this car appeared in their catalogs. It might actually have been TM tooling that was never put into production before the company sold out.

Thank you all for answering my question. It looks like my idea got lots of raspberries, and that's o.k. Yes, Richard, I do have one of the Proto 2000 type 21s in Sinclair. This Walthers tank still has a use, along with a half-dozen or so unimproved Accurail boxcars and a couple of Athearn hoppers. They are expendable cars that visiting kids to run on my layout, and I won't be too upset if they take that long dive to the floor.

Yours Aye,


Garth Groff


On 3/28/14 4:33 PM, Riverboy wrote:

 
I don't want to sound too ignorant, but exactly which Walthers tank car are you referring to? I'd like to look and see how hideous it really is.

Tod Dwyer (Ohio) 
 

From: Garth Groff
To: STMFC@...
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2014 2:12 PM
Subject: [STMFC] Walthers Hideous Tank Car
 
Friends,

After a long break for other interests, I have returned to trains and
rejoined this group. It will be great to become reacquainted with old
friends, and make some new ones.

So I'm sitting here looking at a Walthers tank car. When I cleared out
my Athearn-quality cars years back I kept this car. I figured it would
be good to have a dozen or so "expendable" cars that guests or kids
could run on my layout and not cause me to have a coronary if they were
damaged, and at that time I was building a portable layout to take to a
now-defunct train show I often attended. Besides, it is a Sinclair car,
and my sweetheart is a Sinclair by descent. She always liked this car,
and it never hurts to score points with one's spouse.

I know the tank scales out to about 11K gallons and the dome is
oversized. What intrigues me is the underframe and tank saddles. Is the
underframe close to any prototype, especially one not done with more
quality by the IM or Proto cars? I'm wondering if anyone has ever
considered shimming the saddles and dropping a more prototypical tank
onto this underframe to get something a bit different. Detailing on the
frame itself is a bit clunky, but the corner steps, and some of the rods
and piping, could be replaced by wire for a layout-quality car.

Thoughts? Ideas? Raspberries?

Yours Aye,

Garth Groff
al_brown03
 

I humbly suggest that this car can be improved, with some work but without undue difficulty. Pending the moderators' approval, I've posted a few photos in an album called "Upgraded Walthers Tank Cars". Both cars date from 1993-94 originally, were upgraded between 2010 and 2013, and have been shown at Cocoa Beach. They're meant to represent prototypes shown in Culotta, FCRM 2 pp 46-49 and 52-55; see what y'all think. Put it this way, I liked the first one (GATX 30903) well enough to do the second (GATX 18130). The underframe shown belongs to GATX 18130.

Al Brown, Melbourne, Fla.
Tony Thompson
 

Al Brown wrote:

I humbly suggest that this car can be improved, with some work but without undue difficulty. Pending the moderators' approval, I've posted a few photos in an album called "Upgraded Walthers Tank Cars". Both cars date from 1993-94 originally, were upgraded between 2010 and 2013, and have been shown at Cocoa Beach. They're meant to represent prototypes shown in Culotta, FCRM 2 pp 46-49 and 52-55; see what y'all think. Put it this way, I liked the first one (GATX 30903) well enough to do the second (GATX 18130). The underframe shown belongs to GATX 18130.

        Despite the severe criticism of Mr. Hendrickson, I too have tried to improve these cars, mostly from the days when we had few alternatives. It always intrigued me that the Walthers model has almost exactly copied the former Varney/Lifelike tank, but a new underframe. If you think the Walthers underframe sucks, you must never have seen the Varney version. One thing that helps any of these cars immensely is to replace the enormously oversize and clunky manway cover on the dome top. You can use a bolted cover of the more modern type, or the old screw-in type; the Tichy tank car detail set contains both. I showed this replacement in a blog post awhile back, which is at this link:


Tony Thompson             Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705         www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, tony@...
Publishers of books on railroad history
Richard Hendrickson
 

Well, as I wrote in my post, YMMV.  But I liked Tim O’Connor’s comparison to a pig with lipstick.

Richard Hendrickson


On Mar 29, 2014, at 10:51 AM, Tony Thompson <tony@...> wrote:


Al Brown wrote:

I humbly suggest that this car can be improved, with some work but without undue difficulty. Pending the moderators' approval, I've posted a few photos in an album called "Upgraded Walthers Tank Cars". Both cars date from 1993-94 originally, were upgraded between 2010 and 2013, and have been shown at Cocoa Beach. They're meant to represent prototypes shown in Culotta, FCRM 2 pp 46-49 and 52-55; see what y'all think. Put it this way, I liked the first one (GATX 30903) well enough to do the second (GATX 18130). The underframe shown belongs to GATX 18130.

        Despite the severe criticism of Mr. Hendrickson, I too have tried to improve these cars, mostly from the days when we had few alternatives. It always intrigued me that the Walthers model has almost exactly copied the former Varney/Lifelike tank, but a new underframe. If you think the Walthers underframe sucks, you must never have seen the Varney version. One thing that helps any of these cars immensely is to replace the enormously oversize and clunky manway cover on the dome top. You can use a bolted cover of the more modern type, or the old screw-in type; the Tichy tank car detail set contains both. I showed this replacement in a blog post awhile back, which is at this link:


Tony Thompson             Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
Tony Thompson
 

Richard Hendrickson wrote:

Well, as I wrote in my post, YMMV.  But I liked Tim O’Connor’s comparison to a pig with lipstick.
__,_._,_

      Well, to mix metaphors, you can help choose the lipstick, or you can curse the darkness.  

Tony Thompson             Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705         www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, tony@...
Publishers of books on railroad history
Garth Groff <sarahsan@...>
 

Tony,

Very interesting. Yes, it does look better.

I am still holding out for the Walthers car being completely new tooling over the Varney/Likelike examples (though scaled from the older models). I remember that the dome top on my original Varney car was a separate casting, and IIRC, the ends were too. There was something different about the tank. I think it was a right and a left half factory glued together. The Walthers car uses the separate bottom sheet like Athearn models. Whatever the parentage of the Walthers car, or its predecessors, the tank is still way too big.

Yours Aye,


Garth Groff

On 3/29/14 1:51 PM, Tony Thompson wrote:

 
Al Brown wrote:

I humbly suggest that this car can be improved, with some work but without undue difficulty. Pending the moderators' approval, I've posted a few photos in an album called "Upgraded Walthers Tank Cars". Both cars date from 1993-94 originally, were upgraded between 2010 and 2013, and have been shown at Cocoa Beach. They're meant to represent prototypes shown in Culotta, FCRM 2 pp 46-49 and 52-55; see what y'all think. Put it this way, I liked the first one (GATX 30903) well enough to do the second (GATX 18130). The underframe shown belongs to GATX 18130.

        Despite the severe criticism of Mr. Hendrickson, I too have tried to improve these cars, mostly from the days when we had few alternatives. It always intrigued me that the Walthers model has almost exactly copied the former Varney/Lifelike tank, but a new underframe. If you think the Walthers underframe sucks, you must never have seen the Varney version. One thing that helps any of these cars immensely is to replace the enormously oversize and clunky manway cover on the dome top. You can use a bolted cover of the more modern type, or the old screw-in type; the Tichy tank car detail set contains both. I showed this replacement in a blog post awhile back, which is at this link:


Tony Thompson             Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705         www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, tony@...
Publishers of books on railroad history
Tony Thompson
 

Garth Groff wrote:

I am still holding out for the Walthers car being completely new tooling over the Varney/Likelike examples (though scaled from the older models). I remember that the dome top on my original Varney car was a separate casting, and IIRC, the ends were too. There was something different about the tank. I think it was a right and a left half factory glued together. The Walthers car uses the separate bottom sheet like Athearn models. Whatever the parentage of the Walthers car, or its predecessors, the tank is still way too big.

    Yes, it may well be entirely new tooling. Certainly the underframe is new. But making an EXACT copy of the dreadfully oversize and malproportioned manway cover seems like an awfully odd choice if you have a clean sheet of paper. Your descriptions of changes in the tank from the original Varney do apply to the LifeLike version. But if you measure a Varney, a LifeLike and a Walthers tank, they are dimensionally all the same, regardless of whether anyone made new tooling. I entirely agree that you are right that the size is too big to represent a widely used tank car, it is in fact, 11,100 gallons if you measure it. 
     But as my good friend Mr. Hendrickson often says, there are an awful lot of steam-era tank car prototypes, a broad variety which we can't model and likely never will, so having different-looking tank cars (at least in a "mainline" fleet) is not entirely a bad thing.

Tony Thompson             Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705         www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, tony@...
Publishers of books on railroad history
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