There has been some postings regarding the following tank car on TB as well as another forum or two. I am talking about the Atlas produced GATX 96500 or as some have called it a "Rail Whale". GATX only made one and it was never placed into revenue service. All the others, with brands such as Texaco and Wanda, are all foobies. You would have thought that ConCor produced them. At any rate here is my version with an attempt to get rid of the very heavy plastic railings. I intend to weather the model quite heavily and run in my trains. I also have the Wanda car as well. I had to scratch the truck carriages on the cars and I removed the original trucks that had pizza cutter flanges. I used MT long shank and no shank trucks with FVM wheels,, I only had 33" wheel sets but nobody will ever know the diff unless I tell them. Hope you enjoy, be well, Carl
Stepping back into the archives...some older photos. I built the C44-9W when Athearn first released the undecorated blue box kit in the 90s. I like the treatment I gave the 3048... And then there's the MR&T train, to which I need to add two cars.
There is an LED set in the firebox door area of the cab. It is set to cv5 and flickers irregularly. A trick to install and set up, but fun to watch!!
Still no luck unearthing a pic of the prototype (if there is one?) but still looking. I did find that I have a second set of those decals. Not sure why I have two but I do.
Any interest in parting with them? Even if they are foobies, I could be persuaded to do one up . . . .
The online archive of Railmodel Journal may be a place to start. They have a good amount of intermodal modeling articles. Every few magazines will have an index of previous issues, so if you can find one that has the intermodal index, you could find the issue on 89' cars. I remember articles on Walthers vs Athearn cars, hitches, trailers, and more. if they don't have a photo, hopefully there is some mention of the NOPB cars. Some of those articles have really good reference photos, but my disclaimer is that I don't know if this car is in there.
Thanks for the reminder on that. Being a South Louisiana Native, I keep a close eye on a lot of sites with New Orleans railroad photos, when I'm not railfanning there myself. Suffice to say I have yet to find any such pictures.
