Still run your Old rolling stock?

[jbsmith]

Does anyone still run or even still have,,rolling stock  that you have had since you were a kid?

I still do!
For me my old rolling stock dates back to the mid to late 1970s.
Sill got some of my original AHM and Tyco cars.
I even still have an NW coupola caboose, HO scale, made by Lionel!
I was going to scavenge it for parts,,but then i turned it over and
saw the word "Lionel" on the bottom it became a Keeper.
I was surprised by that,,did a bit of research and rediscovered that yes,
for a brief time Lionel did produce HO scale trains

Sometimes I still run these,,get out the Tyco cars,,a Sara Lee box/reefr,Star Kist box/reefer, Borax hopper, Ajax hopper,Jell-O hopper,Kellogg's hopper, Berkshire Ham and Bacon reefer,,AHM? Dairymans League reefer and a AHM Oscar Meyer reefer that i still got the AHM box for it!
Used to have the Tyco Morton Salt hopper,,but that one vanished,,no idea when it vanished.

Still got the Tyco,,I think it is about a 60 footer Hi-Cube Union Pacific boxcar,
a very prototypical car for Tyco at the time.

Still have the Michigan Alkyline tanker,PennRR Gondola and SF caboose and
FM C-Liner from my very first set, AHM. The C-liner still works! It is not in mint
condition, took parts from a beyond fixing it twin C-liner such as removing
the traction tire wheels and replacing them with wheels that do not need
tires,,the loco can't pull more than 3 or 4 cars now,,but it Works!
Kind of thrill to hear that loco growl again after being in storage for about
24 years. The C-liner is Santa Fe War bonnet, classic red and silver.

Got some other rolling stock units too, but thats enough for now.
Your Turn!

[Chuck S]

Aah, a trip down memory lane...

Wow, and what memories they are!  I remember being 15 and visiting an uncle in Atlanta, GA.  I went to a LHS and saw a six pack of undecorated box cars (these were kits).  Had to have them.  I can't remember the brand or price, but I do remember being short on cash.  There was also infatuated with a Bachmann Union Pacific steam loco (smoke unit), a 2-6-0 if I remember. The owner and I struck a deal.  I would take care of his lawn the following weekend and he would give me the loco and cars.  Showed up at 7:00 am and got to work!  That was 25 years ago.  The loco officially "died" ten years ago, but I still have the box cars.  I just left them undecorated all these years.  They are still in good condition and roll smooth.

Thanks for taking the time to read!

Chuck S
Pueblo, CO

[jward]

the tyco and ahm stuff, like most train set equipment from the 1970s, were truly dismal performers. and yet.....i still have some around. with a little investment to replace the wheelsets and the truck mounted couplers you could make some nice running cars out of them. some of the stuff they had was truly unique, like the 60' hi cube boxcar, or its little brother, the standard height 60' boxcar. ahm had a model of a tie car, sort of a bulkhead flat with a bar cage along the sides. or the 6 dome tank car. all of these i would consider upgrading simply because of their uniqueness.
and back in the days before the bowser cabooses, the old tyco streamlined caboose could be kitbashed into a reasonable model of a pennsylvania N8 class caboose.....

metal wheels and body mounted kadees make a world of difference.

[Johnson Bar Jeff]

For me, the rolling stock from my childhood means the '60s, and even the early '60s. 

Most of what I still have from those thrilling days of yesteryear is now just on display for nostalgic purposes; however, I'm now actively collecting--and running--rolling stock from those days, especially Mantua/Tyco from the late '50s and early-to-mid '60s.

Thank you, eBay. ... 

It amazes me what you can sometimes find "out there." A year ago Christmas I scored a half a dozen old Tyco freight car kits--great kits, with solid cast-metal underframes and screw-on trucks. The kits had been assembled, but the wheels showed no sign of track wear, and the paint was in pristine condition. The cars were in their original boxes. The only thing wrong with them was that once assembled, the kits really didn't fit the boxes--the couplers stuck out too far--so that most of the couplers were broken. But replacing the couplers was no big deal. Now they are among my current favorite pieces of rolling stock. 

[Woody Elmore]

I guess I disclose my age when I mention my Main Line models and Ambroid kit built cars that I have.

There was some pretty awful stuff made in the seventies. I enjoyed buying Tyco and Life Like cars at train shows and swap meets (often two for a dollar) and redoing them. I had a whole train of AHM offset side hopper cars. I went through many experiments before I was able to retruck them with my favorite trucks from Central Valley and Kadee couplers. I passed on my collection to a minister who still has them on a layout in the church hall basement. By the way, the Atlas FP-7s I gave him are still running after thirty years although we did have to replace the wheelsets once or twice.

[Eryalen]

Does anyone still run or even still have,,rolling stock  that you have had since you were a kid?

I still do!
For me my old rolling stock dates back to the mid to late 1970s.
Sill got some of my original AHM and Tyco cars.
I even still have an NW coupola caboose, HO scale, made by Lionel!
I was going to scavenge it for parts,,but then i turned it over and
saw the word "Lionel" on the bottom it became a Keeper.
I was surprised by that,,did a bit of research and rediscovered that yes,
for a brief time Lionel did produce HO scale trains

Sometimes I still run these,,get out the Tyco cars,,a Sara Lee box/reefr,Star Kist box/reefer, Borax hopper, Ajax hopper,Jell-O hopper,Kellogg's hopper, Berkshire Ham and Bacon reefer,,AHM? Dairymans League reefer and a AHM Oscar Meyer reefer that i still got the AHM box for it!
Used to have the Tyco Morton Salt hopper,,but that one vanished,,no idea when it vanished.

Still got the Tyco,,I think it is about a 60 footer Hi-Cube Union Pacific boxcar,
a very prototypical car for Tyco at the time.

Still have the Michigan Alkyline tanker,PennRR Gondola and SF caboose and
FM C-Liner from my very first set, AHM. The C-liner still works! It is not in mint
condition, took parts from a beyond fixing it twin C-liner such as removing
the traction tire wheels and replacing them with wheels that do not need
tires,,the loco can't pull more than 3 or 4 cars now,,but it Works!
Kind of thrill to hear that loco growl again after being in storage for about
24 years. The C-liner is Santa Fe War bonnet, classic red and silver.

Got some other rolling stock units too, but thats enough for now.
Your Turn!

Personally, I would keep them exactly as is, they are collectors items. Better to buy new stuff to modify. At a minimum, keep all the old parts so you can restore them.

[Jim Banner]

Personally, I would keep them exactly as is, they are collectors items. Better to buy new stuff to modify. At a minimum, keep all the old parts so you can restore them.

A lot of that old stuff we modified was new at the time we modified it.  Just like the new stuff you modify today will be old stuff in 30 or 40 years, and might be collectors items by then.

One of my favorite old cars is a Tyco flat from the late sixties.  It has a bird's nest of electronics stuck on it from my early experiments with multi train control, a contemporary of G.E.'s Aztrac.  (It's been so long I have forgotten how to spell it.)

The trains I had as a kid were MARX and my originals are long gone.  But I have managed to acquire and restore the exact types of cars I had, thanks to eBay.  I started off with S-scale sized cars running on 0-27 track.  Almost 60 years later, I am getting into S-scale sized cars running on H0 track (think 0n₃₀.)

Jim

[willrupe]

Yup; I like them too. I found out that the Tyco culvert flats could be easily converted into coil cars and will do about seven for the club layout. A Tyco Baldwin Sharknose is getting a new lease on life. It now has the mechanism from a superweight Athearn F7 installed inside the carbody (bought as body only at a train show) A little metal had to be removed from the nose end of the underframe to let the Tyco carbody sit flat upon its new underframe, The nicest thing was the discovery that the Sharknose carbody was able to snap on to the tabs that Athearn used to mount their own carbodies to the mechanism. A match that looks like it was purposely designed that wasy at the factory from the beginning. The last thing done to this model was to replace the EMD Blomberg trucks with thos from an Alco RS-3 trucks by Roundhouse. these were ordered from Athearn. I am still working on this model for it is my intention to add a sound decoder to it. Yours, William Rupert

[The Chaz Storm]

Believe it or not I actually found my old HO tanker last night after digging through some of my old stuff last night.  So it's funny that this thread was made.   It was a North American N.A.TX. 5912 single dome.  It was in great condition...minus losing one of it's coupling hooks.   Sometime next weekend I'm thinking about getting Knuckle couplers for it.  (The other coupler is a Kadee, and I prefer Knuckle couplers over Kadee any day.)

Anyways some of the other old rolling stock I had gotten when I was a kid were ones that came from kits, they were Christmas related type of boxcars and I had gotten a Union Pacific flatbed too. 

So to answer your question "Do I still run my old rolling stock?", Yes... yes I do....

[bevernie]

 ;)GREETINGS!! ???What is all this hype about "OLD STOCK"?? :oTHAT is what I am running, when I can run it!! :-\I'm still trying to get my layout up and running, but most of my stuff is TYCO, AHM, BACHMANN, and LIFE-LIKE!!
::)All is DC, and the closest that I have gotten to a "remote control" is the old LIFE-LIKE set-up that you hook to your track, and a hand-held gizmo lets you go forward (3 speeds), backward, or stop. It also has the diesel horn button that you can use, but the sound comes out of the station that the power is coming from!
     :PWith over a hundred engines, I don't see a conversion to DCC at all, and I'm really wondering if I want to go to ALL THE TROUBLE AND EXPENSE of converting my COUPLERS!!
      ;)No, when I do get everything up and running, it will not be very prototypical, but it will be fun.
       :DSmoking engines, burning buildings (2), lots of sirens and other noisemakers that I have gotten out of toys gotten at GOODWILL and other "JUNK STORES"!! I've even got (somewhere) the sound of a guy taking a shower- it was originally in a toy duck!!- that I'm going to put in my "TRUCKSTOP"!!
         :oYup!! It'll be fun, noisy, but NOT prototypical!!
                                                                                            THANX!!
                                                                                            Ernie
       

[Johnson Bar Jeff]

     :PWith over a hundred engines, I don't see a conversion to DCC at all, and I'm really wondering if I want to go to ALL THE TROUBLE AND EXPENSE of converting my COUPLERS!!

Tell you what, Ernie. My situation is similar to yours. I have 14 computer-paper boxes full of almost 50 years' worth of HO equipment. The engines are all DC, and I'm staying with DC. Moreover, almost all the rolling stock has horn-hook couplers--and mostly the stock is staying with horn-hooks.

I say "mostly" because I have converted a few pieces to knuckle couplers. When I bought my Spectrum Richmond 4-4-0 (because I wanted a circa-1900 4-4-0), I almost retrofit it with horn-hooks. Ultimately I decided not to, and converted a few pieces of Mantua old-time rolling stock to knuckles so that I would have a train for the engine to pull. I discovered that you can drop a knuckle coupler right in the truck-mounted coupler pocket of the Mantua 1860-series freight cars, and it works just fine.

But virtually all the rolling stock is staying with horn-hooks, "as built" by the manufacturer.

And the Richmond eight-wheeler runs on DC. 

[Johnson Bar Jeff]

One of my favorite old cars is a Tyco flat from the late sixties.  It has a bird's nest of electronics stuck on it from my early experiments with multi train control, a contemporary of G.E.'s Aztrac.  (It's been so long I have forgotten how to spell it.)

I think it was ASTRAC, Jim. 

When I was a kid I somehow acquired a book on model railroading--I think the author was David Sutton Rose but I'm at work now and can't check--that included a chapter that touted ASTRAC as the coming BIG THING in model railroading.

I often wondered what happened with that system because I never heard or read anything else about it except in that book. 

[Johnson Bar Jeff]

I think it was ASTRAC, Jim. 

When I was a kid I somehow acquired a book on model railroading--I think the author was David Sutton Rose but I'm at work now and can't check--that included a chapter that touted ASTRAC as the coming BIG THING in model railroading.

I often wondered what happened with that system because I never heard or read anything else about it except in that book. 

Well, I was close, but I guess that only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

The book I referred to, above, was called The Complete Book of Model Railroading, and the author was David Sutton (no "Rose"--I wonder where I got that from?  ). It was copyrighted in 1964, and it contained a chapter titled "ASTRAC--A New Concept for Radio Frequency Control."

[richG]

I have some very old Marx 0-27 tinplate that I use to run under the Christmas tree but stopped that after a couple times. Tinplate is Very noisy. You cannot hear yourself think when it is running. All metal rolling stock and engines.

Rich

[jward]

regarding astrac,
i believe it was discontinued for lack of sales. but the concept has been refined and upgrades. we now know it as dcc.