This is a bit of a special project as my first completely 3D printed car. What is even more amazing it was truly “homemade” on a hobbyist printer. Ben Trousdale AKA Benn Central made this car. He must have spent many hours doing the design then tweaking it all to fit together REALLY well almost to the level of a good injected plastic kit. Ben estimates it is over 2000 hours spent between the learning curve of Sketchup and designing the car. The detail level achieved was awesome with individual holes for the roofwalk. The fact that handrails can be printed goes against everything I knew of 3D printing when I was using my FORM1 printer. There was NO way you could print something that small, or get it off the supports in 1 piece.

This material is great that it is still somewhat flexible after 6 months and still not painted. Zap A Gap green glues this material very well and quickly. It is a pretty simple kit that could be further detailed but I built it pretty much with the supplied parts.

I did not know much about the real car only to find out it is an extremely popular car. It is known as a Pullman Standard 4750 car because it is 4750 cubic feet. I became more interested when I found out Conrail had some of them as class H56a inherited from Penn Central. Ben was nice enough to give me a preproduction car to assemble.

Decals

Since the car was given to me I figured this would be a budget project. Of course it will be. With only a few lower resolution internet photos of the car I could not zoom in to see what the smaller lettering was. Ben told me the car was made in HO by Intermountain. I decided I wanted the red/brown car and not the gray car at least for now. I looked truly everywhere and searched on Facebook groups. No one in the Conrail group replied they had the car and could scan the side. It was just amazing due to the popularity of the real car. eBay had exactly ONE car and it was pretty heavily weathered. Des Plaines had 1 and I bought it but they could not find the car in stock and cancelled the order. NO one had this car anywhere so I went back to the weathered eBay car and I bought it at a premium price. It was Intermountain 45347-01. That is the first HO trains I have bought in over 30 years. Normally there is no HO in my house.

This is how I have had MANY decals sets made, scanned at 100% with a real ruler in the frame. The decals usually fit perfectly. The photo at left is the HO car. The photo at right is the S Scale car. Even with the HO car having 2 sides reading the fine lettering was a challenge because of the heavy weathering. I had the HO car for about a day and gave it to my friend Gus.

I got the decals made by Circus City. They fit very well.

I painted the car on 5-7-23. I used Tru ColorTCP093 Oxide Brown.

I did not want to car to be too light. The instructions suggested adding 3 ounces in the hopper bays. I like to have my cars heavier than most so I added 6 ounces but with the trucks the car is somehow 13 ounces! I was not expecting that. It should be fine to run wth brass cars.

The stirrup steps are very fragile. All 4 have been repaired a few times each by the time decaling was completed. If I get more I will just be more careful in handling.

Completed 5-14-23

The decaling job is sort of a cobble together of the HO car I bought and the few prototype photos I have of this car. I am not promising text and placement perfection here. The oxide brown is visually striking compared to most gray covered hoppers. It’s done - good enough.

Updated 5-14-23

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