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South Jersey S Scale Modelers

Penn Central Hopper

 

This is a covered hopper made by Lionel as American Flyer starting in 2015. It is an ACF hopper from 1965. My “modern” is lacking in rolling stock. Lionel made some cars with scale wheels. The trucks have rotating bearing end caps which were pretty interesting. But of course there are problems with Lionel making S SCALE cars.

 

Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper1 small

 

Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper2 small

 

 

 

 

Lionel was trying to sell them at about $80.00. I got mine as a goof in January 2019 on eBay new in the box for $40.00. It was car body that was new to me and a bit more modern.

 

Penn Central

In all the eras and railroads I own rolling stock for and have modeled I have mostly skipped everything for Penn Central. It just does not appeal to me as a “dark ages in railroading” thing. This is my 2nd only Penn Central car. I have no Penn Central locos. I am not sure if the paint scheme on this car is correct, and it does not matter to me. Other schemes Lionel offered were clearly made up “foobies”. This is the car straight from the box. I had to knock the Lionel stink off of it.

 

Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper3 small Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper4 small

 

Fixing The Problems

The car is too high because of a very weird truck bolster. It is too shiny. The build date is wrong. Lionel uses the date they released that car for sale. And Lionel somehow managed to get the wheel gauge wrong. Simply amazing. Most of the work I did to fix the height problems can be skipped by using Ace or S Helper Service (now owned by Mike’s Train House) roller bearing trucks. You may have to fiddle a bit to get the coupler heights right. But then it would not be a project would it? I wanted to recycle the side frames and wheels so the bearing end caps would rotate.

 

Fixing the car height was pretty simple. Enter Ben Trousdale AKA Ben Central Shops. Ben designed and sold 3D printed truck bolsters that fixed everything. His design was just great. The coupler height was perfect. I actually bought the bolsters 2 years before I bought a car. It was not that much of an accident for me that my Penn Central car was fixed with Ben Central parts.

 

Another thing I did was grind .015 off the wheel tread with a Dremel. They wheels were code 125 which causes flash short problems on some of my turnouts. I made them code 110. You can see that in the below photos.

 

 

Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper5 small Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper6 small

 

Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper7 small Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper8 small

 

Whenever I get to use my milling machine it just adds to the fun of the project. I like to make my cars heavy. I used my milling machine to make wood molds and cast custom lead weights. Most of the time it works well. This time it was about 3 hours of work only to gain 3 ounces, not as good as I had hoped. What I thought would fit without being seen did not so I had to keep milling the weight smaller. The brass tube was so I did not have to drill a mounting hole.

 

Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper9 small Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper10 small Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper11 small

 

 

Completed 1-26-19

This was just a quick little project to get a different car. I did not change the build date. In 100+ sets of decals I did not have any that would work. Good enough. While maybe not as obvious here I used a mix of Scalecoat flat glaze and gloss to clear coat the car and knock the high gloss off. It is a nice satin finish now like a 1950s rat rod!

Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper12 small Penn_Central_Covered_Hopper13 small

 

 

Added 1-27-19

From Bill Volkmer – Former PRR employee

If there was a job on the railroad Bill has done it

 

If I remember correctly those covered hoppers could only be described as a royal Pain in the posterior.  The NYC began getting them about 1964 and labeled them "Flex-Flo" hoppers.  Not long after they hit the road they began derailing for no apparent reason.   The prevailing theory was that they had an unusually high center of gravity when loaded and with the prevailing poor track maintenance, they would rock off, on even a slight curve.  PRR efforts to protest to the NYC merely drew "fix your damned track" responses.

 

Then one fateful night in winter 1967, in fact it was a bitterly cold night with 6 inches of frozen snow on the ground, we had a derailment between Newberry and Jersey Shore with a couple of those covered hoppers.  We called the wreck train from Renovo and took cross elevation measurements using the wreck derrick for weight which I normally insisted upon.

 

The speed tape indicated the train was going something like 28 mph, the track was pronounced "within spec." and we couldn't find any visible mechanical defects on the covered hopper.   Normally when that situation arose at a wreck we (MM and Trainmaster) would twist the Track Supervisor guy's arm and he'd call it in as a "broken rail" which was always considered to be an act of God so we could all go home and back to bed.

 

Well on this particular derailment nobody yielded and we seemed doomed to freeze to death out there at the derailment scene until we mutually agreed to a cause. So we finally got Philadelphia to buy into the theory that even though the track was in spec and the train speed was legit, the high center of gravity of the car caused it to derail.

 

Bottom line was that from that day forward, a written 19 order was written to each Conductor and Engineman on the Northern Region that "trains containing loaded NYC covered hoppers in XXXXXX number series must not be operated between 15 mph and 40 mph for extended periods of time."

 

Those had to be the most bizarre train orders ever written.

 

Updated 1-27-19

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