A year ago, I was souring on Athearn heavyweight passenger cars, and I put the brakes on acquiring and/or detailing more of them. This year, I bought my first four Walthers heavyweights (a coach and three sleepers), and soon decided to completely abandon the Athearn heavyweights, in favor of Walthers. They have a good level of detail and none of the problems of the Athearn cars. I bought two more sleepers in April.
After reviewing the B&O’s 1949 passenger train consists again, I updated my list of cars needed for the eight trains I’m modeling, using Walthers cars instead of Athearn. I also created a wish list on Trainz.com and saved searches on eBay for the cars I need. In total, there are 46 cars needed (I have 7 of them so far), including heavyweight and streamlined lightweight, but not including the elusive streamlined heavyweights of the Capitol Limited.
The Walthers cars don’t come from the factory with interior lights, but they make LED lighting kits for them. I don’t think I want to use those, because there’s no way to turn them off while they’re on powered track, and I don’t think there’s a capacitor built in, so they’d probably flicker a bit. I’ve been able to install the same LED lighting circuit I came up with for the Athearn heavyweights, which consists of a Digitrax TL-1 single-function decoder, a flat adhesive strip of 12-volt warm white LEDs, a 25-volt 1,000µF capacitor, and a 2.2k resistor. The decoder can either fit in the underside of the roof, or in a bathroom, while the capacitor just barely fits in the little hallway just outside of the vestibule at the ends of the cars, pretty much out of sight.
The first time I ran the cars, on Karl’s layout after the Puyallup show, they derailed frequently. Karl showed me how metal tabs under the car bodies come into contact with screws on the trucks for power pickup, and that interferes with the movement of the trucks when navigating some switches and curves. His solution on his Walthers heavyweights was to yank off the tab with a pair of needle nose pliers (they’re attached with some kind of adhesive film or double-sided tape), and replace them with flexible lightweight wire soldered to the metal pad that the tab had been connected to, and the screw on the truck (I used 30-gauge stranded wire with silicone insulation) At the top of the cars, under the roof, is another pair of metal tabs, which are meant to connect to the Walthers lighting kit. I soldered the decoder’s power leads to those tabs.
When the lights were installed in the first of these cars, light could be seen leaking through the openings where the roof tabs protrude through the side walls. I fixed that by attaching thin strips of black styrene to the underside of the roof, behind the tabs. There was a little more light leakage at the horizontal joint where the roof meets the side walls. I fixed that by carefully brush-painting flat black paint on the top edge of the interior walls, which are molded in beige plastic, which glows slightly when the car lights are on.
With the lights installed, I painted 16 Preiser figures and glued them into the seats in the coach. Since I had to cut off a lot of their feet to get them to sit properly, I saved them in the hopes of modeling a shoe store.
I decided to sell all 12 of the Athearn heavyweights I’d been detailing, except for the 7 that belonged to my dad. At the Puyallup show, I gave them to Tim to sell on consignment. So far, four of the twelve have sold. I rarely see the Walthers heavyweights at local train shows, and when I do, it’s the western roads. Fortunately, I’ve seen a lot of them for sale on trainz.com and eBay, often in new or like-new condition. I’ve paid an average of $60 per car, including tax and shipping. That’s at least three times what I paid for Athearn heavyweights, which I would later spend an unknown but not insignificant amount of money on for parts, like new wheelsets, couplers and interiors (seats, bulkheads, etc.). After spending a lot of time adding details and paint to the interior and exterior of those subpar models, I’ve decided I’d rather pay the extra cost for the accurately-detailed and accurately-sized Walthers cars, and spend my modeling time on structures and their interiors.