Back a few years ago I posted an article that questioned somewhat the accuracy of the Scale-Craft tank car. I do like tank cars – the WWII era photos of long tank car trains are compelling, and I had family members in the industry back in that timeframe too. I have enjoyed having a nice string of tank cars to run, but I wished they were better detailed.

I was excited to see that the latest issue of RMC has a nice historical overview of the production of the UTLX X-3 tank car. The great conclusion for us is that the Scale-Craft model was clearly inspired by the X-3, and with just a couple upgrades is a very nice representation of one.

The prototype cars were built starting in 1916 up to WWII, in a number of sizes. The Scale-Craft model is meant to represent a 8,000-gallon car, which would have been a pretty up-to-date version of the car around the time of the introduction of their model in 1937. Although as I noted in the earlier article, the model is a bit oversized for an 8,000-gallon car and it really may be closer to being a 10,000-gallon car.

Trucks

Among my cars I had upgraded a number of them to Schorr Bettendorf trucks. However, I was struck by how a number of the prototype photos and the scale drawing in the RMC article show the tank cars on Andrews trucks, and early examples are on arch bar trucks. The new trucks by Jeff are a great and simple upgrade to both designs. They look vastly better than the original S-C trucks!

But do note that that arch bar trucks were not allowed interchange service after 1939 and Andrews trucks were not allowed after 1957. The model railroader in me likes to run models together that are era appropriate, and you may want to keep that in mind as well. I will likely keep a few examples (most likely the ones with Champion decals) on the Schorr trucks and upgrade to AB brakes to run with later 1950s equipment.

Brake cylinder

The standard, turned brass Scale-Craft brake cylinder is meant to represent a K type brake cylinder. It is not a very good representation, though. After WWII Eastern produced a great example, which I made a mold of years ago and have reproduced many examples. For this application I drilled out and tapped my soft metal casting to use the original S-C mounting screws. Visually it is a huge upgrade.

But do note that K type brakes were banned from interchange in 1953. I am planning to work out some proper AB brakes for a few examples of this model (with Schorr Bettendorf trucks) to represent these cars as they appeared in the later 1950s.

Brake wheel

Scale-Craft supplied a brake wheel with these models, but my observation is that a lot of people left the detail off. And the one supplied does not look that great either.

I know I’m guilty of not adding this detail to many of the cars I have rebuilt. Both of the cars seen in this article have brake wheels, although on the UTLX car it is not visible in the photo. The RMC scale drawing shows a six-spoke wheel, and I plan to buy cast brass HO wheels of the right type and will install on every model that I have upgraded to “layout” standards. A project not yet completed, but worth taking on over the coming months.

Update: more straps?

If you want to upgrade even more, really there need to be straps on either side of the dome. See how James Trout did it in this post. When you see them on his cars, you can easily see that they are missing and a pretty critical detail. But, as it is an error of omission — without knowing they are missing you would not notice. For now I’ll keep the straps as S-C made them.

A note on the UTLX decals

All but two of my OO UTLX models are lettered with Tichy OO decals. These I posted about a few years ago (here), and I believe Tichy can still sell you OO versions of any of their HO decals on special order. I have already used quite a few sets of the UTLX decals, but with these car upgrades I’m even thinking to do some more!

Other cars I have lettered with Microscale decals, they have a HO set that includes the Orient — the real one, not my proto-freelanced one.

The car above has been updated with Jeff’s OO arch bar trucks to represent a car from the 1920s. I have a small fleet of cars that fit better in a 1930s operational scenario which I will likely be expanding in coming years. I have plenty of projects for sure, and expect to keep posting regularly over the summer.