Back last year I posted an article in which there was a wood hopper car with some work train cars, one that it turned out had been built by the very young Ed Schorr (son of OO manufacturer/importer Fred Schorr) but came to me in pieces.

Since that time I have received and rebuilt five more of these hoppers! They are all similar cars but actually there are some differences and I will describe them by type.

First, as a general reference this type of car is not often seen but I think they may have been inspired by an article published in the October, 1958 issue of Model Railroader. The Jack Work article is titled “Wood hopper car” and one of the photos is of a very similar twin hopper (with steel hopper bottoms) similar to these cars, complete with the same vertical grab irons on the ends of each side. The hopper bottoms on these cars are metal castings, HO parts (I think maybe Varney).

The best two cars today are the first two above. None of these so far as I can tell had ever been lettered. I decided after a lot of deliberation to letter all these cars for my Orient, thinking I could justify running them in company coal service when I run 1930s era trains. These two cars as the best of the lot got the big, splashy “Orient” lettering, along the lines of that used by the actual KCM&O. (My freelanced version of the KCM&O supposes the road stayed independent of the ATSF).

When these cars came to me most were broken apart to a degree and it was a big puzzle to put them back together. Also they lacked trucks and bolsters which must have been taken off to use on other projects and also lacked couplers. Plus the loads were in variable shape and needed refreshed.

The second best car was the single car in the second photo that is with the original car I received. The original was in worse shape actually and I had to repaint it completely. Note the very different design and these 5 hoppers cars are smaller.

The final two cars I suspect may be the original two made as the build quality is not quite as good. These had actually been rebuilt at some prior point previously, as the ribs don’t all match and some are plastic. They now have more of a “stealth” KCM&O scheme, using lettering from a set of tank car decals from Microscale.

I had some work to do to get these cars back together. When the cars and loads were glued back in I sprayed the cars with glosscote to refresh the loads and to prep the sides for decals. After the decals were on I spayed dullcote on but masked the loads so that they would stay looking like coal.

Keen observers will note the new cars do not have couplers yet! They will have them soon, the problem being lack of enough couplers at the moment and also the holes are pretty stripped out so it is not quite as simple as it could be. I plan to use Kadee whisker couplers on the cars which should work out fine.

They roll GREAT on the Schorr trucks and it is fun to see this string of matching cars together on the layout.