Peter's Model Railroading | The Equipment | Box Cars | SP A-50-6
Model Information

This car actually has a very interesting history to it. Bill Green, a member of the Houston S Gaugers, produced a very limited-quantity styrene kit of the SP A-50-6 box car many years ago. Very few people knew about its existence. One day he shared (on the then Yahoo Groups mailing list) photos of a model that fellow Houston S Gauger, Jack Troxell, had built using his kit. The model and photos so stunned everyone, that there was an immediate reaction that others wanted this model as well. Bill still had some of the tooling he used originally, but many years had past. One person volunteered to take over the tooling to re-create a new kit. This proved unsuccessful as some tooling was missing or no longer usable, and the car is actually quite complex. Eventually, Steve Wolcott, owner of Pre-Size Model Specialties, learned of this effort and decided to design the kit in his usual manner, i.e. the same car but without the use of some of Bill's original tooling. This is the result of that effort.

As the instructions to this Pre-Size Model Specialties kit states, this car is a refreshing difference in the sea of 40-foot box cars, as it stands at 51' end-to-end. This is actually my first 50-foot freight car in my small fleet.

(external link: Pre-Size Model Specialties)

This photo shows all of the kit's contents. The main parts are the one-piece cast-resin body, the floor/underframe, the fish-belly beams, and the wooden walkway. Also included are the decals (the strip on the right-hand side of the photo), a collection of brass wire, a package of size-separated grab irons (neat!), two barrels, and a bag of various detailing parts (upper-left corner in the photo). The main body is quite heavy and its walls are quite thick. The doors are part of the casting, so they cannot be modeled in an opened position. The kit's instructions are available as a downloadable PDF file from the company's web site.

(external link: Kit Instructions (PDF))