Hubert TopGon: IT IS NEW TOOLING!

[Ryan87]

What would you do to the atlas car to make it look like a coal porter ..

Take the trucks off and put them on a (LBF, Athearn, deluxe, Kato) Coalporter 

[John]

What would you do to the atlas car to make it look like a coal porter ..

Take the trucks off and put them on a (LBF, Athearn, deluxe, Kato) Coalporter 

LOL .. I always take the trucks of LBF cars ... and replace them with something better

[Denver Road Doug]

What would you do to the atlas car to make it look like a coal porter ..

There was a recent article (March/April 2005 issue of Nscale Railroading) about converting an Atlas 90T car to a TopGon.

[John]

oh . that one .. I remember now ..

[Ryan87]

on the subject of cost, LBF has always been expensive most likely the reason being two fold. As Doug mentioned they're produced domestically, also they've traditionally done very small production runs. Hubert's seems to be keeping to this model. (if not some of LBF's less sound business practices...)
What would it take to get lower prices? China?

I'm sure NS guys will bite, If you really want it you'll pay...

[inkaneer]

What would you do to the atlas car to make it look like a coal porter ..

There was an article in one of the Nscale mags on it.  Involved a lot of work as I recall and the end product was not quite accurate.

[GonzoCRFan]

It's really just a question of supply and demand. If you model NS, you more or less NEED these cars if you want your railroad to look like a model of NS. So you have the following options:

1: Have no Top Gons in your fleet.

2: Buy the Huberts car.

3: Scratchbuild a master and cast your own.

4: Kitbash them from an Atlas 90-Ton hopper, then cast them.

If you have more time than money, the last two are the way to go.

When you look at probably $18 for a brand new car with 2 printing passes, and know that a 20-year old Micro Trains car with the same number of passes is still selling for that same amount, does it really seem so bad?

If people don't want to pay $18 a pop, and multi-packs don't offer enough of a price drop, they can always wait until they've sat around a while and are just being liquidated. Of course, that will be the end of Huberts (and probably most other manufacturers) trying to mass-produce road-specific cars in N scale. But if this experiment succeeds, many more of us could benefit from it down the road. So I really hope Huberts does well with this car.

[Mark5]

Does anyone on here really have the skill to cast their own Top Gons (or hoppers) which have open ends outside the slope sheets? ???

[Mark5]

To mod these from the Atlas H11b 100 Ton hopper I guess you'd have to change the number of side ribs and fabricate the lower section (for starters).

Then of course repeat at least 25 times.

[Ryan87]

I think the time and money spent trying to kitbash or cast any number of these cars would start making 18 bucks for RTR look pretty good...

Hopefully we'll start seeing more road specific freight cars. With this and Intermountain's Canadian Pacific Telloi car I wonder what's around the bend....

[daniel_leavitt2000]

Well road specific cars have been produced before. Con-Cor/Life-Like made the CR X72. MRC made the PRR/LV X58.

I still want to see CP/CN newsprint cars.

[Frank Amato]

I still want to see CP/CN newsprint cars.

Yeah, wasn't there a thread floating around to see if there was enough interest in a resin model?  If not, I wonder if this may be an opportunity for FVM to produce these cars...

[Robbman]

Message deleted

[ditterke]

Not really answering your questions, but perhaps interesting in this context: "How to …"
For a specific scene I needed a wagon-type which doesn't exist as a common commercial model.
http://www.mobablog.info/blog.php?id=359
The text ist German but the pictures are self-explanatory

jaffa --- alias JürgeN

[Frank Amato]

I still want to see CP/CN newsprint cars.

Is there an HO model of one?

I belive Life-Like (Proto 2000?) makes them in HO.