One of the Naperville Sunshine Minikit giveaways was a set of side overlays to convert an Atlas AAR offset side hopper to the alternate standard, and it came with decals for Montour and Cambrian & Indiana. The instruction sheet that comes with it doesn't have a photo of the actual cars, but has photos of ribbed side cars to show lettering.

My question is - since Intermountain has released the very nice alternate standard car making lots of NKP and C&O fans very happy... would anybody be interested in this Sunshine minikit today? I recently found my entire pile of Naperville minikits. Many of them I will keep and use, but some like this one, I will never use and plan to list on that auction site. Is there anything special about this minikit that would make it desirable over the IM car?

Andy

Is there anything special about this minikit that would make it

> desirable over the IM car?

You mean other than the fact that you already own it, probably no
one wants the minikit anymore, what the heck else can you do with
the Atlas models, and where are you going to find accurate decals?

Tim O'Connor

Andy Harman asked:
"My question is - since Intermountain has released the very nice alternate
standard car making lots of NKP and C&O fans very happy... would anybody be
interested in this Sunshine minikit today? I recently found my entire pile
of Naperville minikits. Many of them I will keep and use, but some like
this one, I will never use and plan to list on that auction site. Is there
anything special about this minikit that would make it desirable over the

IM car?"

It'll allow you to use models of the first run of the Atlas offset twin, which had a strange (and inaccurate) double center post that was corrected on later runs.

Ben Hom

At 04:21 AM 4/15/2015 -0400, you wrote:

You mean other than the fact that you already own it, probably no
one wants the minikit anymore, what the heck else can you do with
the Atlas models, and where are you going to find accurate decals?

The minikit came with decals for both C&O and Montour, those may be worth more than the resin parts alone.

Andy

At 06:10 AM 4/15/2015 -0700, you wrote:

I recently completed the NYC USRA offset side conversion. The castings weren't too bad. I used a Tichy hopper (not an Accurail car as recommended) and the process went well, although the decals supplied by SS were horrible. Very fuzzy. I ended up decaling the car letter-by-letter and it took forever.

Actually for my (mumble) era there were more of the NKP 3-bay offset side cars in service than the 2-bay, and there's no model that currently exists of that car either. The old MDC and/or the Stewart/Bowser 3-bay offset is just a stand in. Just one of many on my to-do list someday, or wait for someone to offer a resin kit or conversion. Unlike the N&W H-10, I don't need 50 of them - a small sampling of 2-3 would be enough and so I wouldn't mind doing a kitbash or resin build.

I believe Martin did a MP hopper-top conversion. If you've got that one and are letting it go, can you give me a shout, please?

I think I may have sold that one last year.

Andy

My thoughts exactly!  Either that, or “Scott - I’ll sell you that kit today - it comes with the AAR standard car sides already attached”  (aka an under Atlas car) Yeah, I guess it isn’t quite up to the IM standards, but you can bash it to that level ;)  Of course, there is also the Kadee car...