A Late July Suprise!

 I seem to stumble headfirst into bargains and blessings...

It happened again.  A gentleman on another forum had received a large box of trains from a friend and when I inquired about purchasing a few items he insisted on sending them and other items to me for the price of shipping.  I of course agreed and after unpacking a very well-packed box (not pictured), here's what arrived this week.

The charming little streetcar is a surprise addition.  Can't wait to give it a try. 

The  Bachmann Chessie boxcar B&O 11147 is something I've actually been looking for.  Why you ask would I look for such a common car? Well, sharp eyed folks will notice the short ladders.  What you can't see is that it also doesn't have the roof walk of it's more common incarnation.  I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point the tooling for this boxcar was semi-modernized with a plain roof and lowered side ladders.  The brakewheel is still high, but it's a nice little car and good modern filler for an 80s/90's collection like mine. 

The bottom two cars are AHM (IHC/Model Power/Roco/etc) "Heated Tank Cars". It's a very odd and rare prototype that I will probably someday do a separate post about, but it has the distinction of being the only "modern" style tank car to come from the cheap "train set" style Ready-To-Run manufacturers.  I've been collecting them and have plans to paint alot of them black, but the delicious Hershey's tank will be staying as-is.

This clean ABA set of Athaern Amtrak Phase 1 F7's looks quite nice.  Haven't had a chance to test them yet but I'm informed they run and I can see they are comparatively recent with both A units having the shiny brass flywheels .  They don't have any windows, but I've got a small stash of Walthers detail kits for these locos that include windows! All stirrups looks to be intact and beyond the windows all they need is a set of horns (which I already have) for one of the A units.  I even have some Amtrak decals I can use to renumber on of the A units if I choose to.

A set of 3 Con Cor Phase 2 Superliners.   Need truck retainer pegs (will replace with screws) and some weights, but otherwise good and should be easy to get on the rails. 

And here's the gems of the batch.  A few loose pieces, but with just a bit of work these Walthers Phase 2 Amfleet wont' take much work to hit the rails. 

He even included an instruction sheet fot the Amfleet cars.

Thanks again to the generous benefactor who made this possible!   

Karl