Friday, March 3, 2023

Flat Car Friday - New York Central 70-ton AAR Flat Car

 


While this image is far from great, it does display two things that I'd like to see more: loads of crates and NYC 70-ton AAR flats. Crates are a fairly simple load to create from styrene stock or the old Sunshine export crates load, if you have one. They are easy to customize by creating your own lettering and printing decals in black stenciling or having them printed by a third party, such as PDC. They are also simple to secure using Chartpack or similar tape to simulate the banding.

I also rarely see models of the NYC 70-ton AAR flat cars in HO. It cannot be a lack of offerings since Intermountain has produced quite nice replicas and Sunshine also offered kits that still appear on the secondary market and do not fetch exorbitant Sunshine prices since there is a good styrene alternative. Protowest also briefly offered resin kits for the 70-ton AAR flats, although they are a bit crude, in my opinion. Fine decals are also available from National Scale Car. With a fleet of 1,000 cars, they are significant flat car prototypes that warrant inclusion in just about any model fleet.

I plan to take my own musings to heart and complete one in the near future.

5 comments:

  1. What is that freight car on the right? Those are impressive vertical rows of rivets.

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  2. Hello Brian- I am uncertain. I know some of the Southern's postwar AAR box cars had similar rows of rivets adjacent to the end corners. However, this isn't one of those cars. I'm going to keep my eyes open for this to see if I can pin it down. Thanks for pointing that out

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    1. Ted, I did some research after my comment and found I have the image of the flat car that shows a little more of the car on the right. Reporting marks D and S with a 4 below can be seen so from a 1953 ORER it must be a 40' DSDX RB. The image might be one of your Ebay scans.

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    2. Thank you Brian! I think I have some pics of those. Might make a good posting of its own. I will look once I return from my trip. Thank you

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  3. The NYC 70 ton flats that were "home brewed" are slightly different from the commercial car builders; I know the location of stake pockets was different, still comparing other drawings.

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Comments always welcome!