A Feast of Orange! EJ&E Caboose and Amtrak MOW Difco Dump Hopper

Two carrot-colored kits to share today.  The first is a Walthers Amtrak Difco Dump Gondola kit.   It's a bit more fiddly than some of the other Walthers kits I've assembled, but the end result is nice. The frame is metal which brings it close to NMRA recommendations.  A nice feature in a kit like this that has so few places to hide added weight.



A nifty and unique-looking piece of MOW equipment.  It appears that the kit is designed to be dumpable and with drop sides in both directions. However, mine has a miscast base and being years OOP, I will have to be satisfied with it in the upright, closed position.

The real treasure though -as far as I'm concerned- is this Athearn EJ&E caboose kit.  Part of my childhood was spent at the intersection of the EJ&E and CNW (now CN and Union Pacific) lines in West Chicago Illinois, so I'm partial to these two railroads.

Based on the fact that it has printing on the ends of the coupla (and that there was a barcode on the box), this is probably from the last decade of Athearn blue box kit production.  It was a lucky unassembled find at a train show in Joliet last year.

I trimmed out the crossbar and the window frames in order to make it look a bit more modern and closer to prototype.  In retrospect I should have left the frame in place to keep the apertures a bit smaller but I still like the look.  I left frame edges black to slightly hide the fact that the windows are so far recessed.

In addition to window modifications and glazing I added the yellow detail painting.

Considering it's probably 50 year old  tooling not designed with this prototype in mind,  it's not a bad likeness of the actual EJ&E 536 .   I've been wanting an EJ&E caboose for a while and I'm definitely happy to have this in my collection.

-Karl