This weeks freight car Friday is a bit late, sorry, small family emergency.

This week I have a Con-Cor PS-2 covered hopper from 1989. Grabbed it off of the shelf thinking it would be one of those quick builds. Turns out back in the 1980’s the cars had pin mounted trucks with the coupler as part of the truck. It’s my understanding that these cars were originally from AHM and that Con-Cor had bought the molds.

Didn’t want truck mounted couplers and the trucks themselves were horribly out of scale.

The first step was to drill out the pin hole and put in a new styrene post. Once the glue had hardened I made a spacer out of .060 sheet styrene. This gave me the correct height for the thickness of the new trucks to be mounted.

It was then just a matter of cutting off the excess post.

I then drilled out the post and tapped it for the 2-56 screw. In the photo you can see the shim for the coupler mount. The styrene for the shim was included in the kit. Con-Cor had not yet started to change over the kits to body mounted couplers. They did offer very basic instructions for mounting Kadee #5 couplers and boxes. In the instructions they wanted you to cut off the coupler mounting portion of the truck. That would have made an ugly truck just that much more ugly. That’s why I replaced them.

Adding the coupler mounting draft gear (the box the coupler goes into) was very easy. The shim was the proper height so it was just a matter of drilling a hole and then tapping it for the mounting screw. Once mounted I gave it a quick coat of Green Zinc Chromate paint as it was the closest to BN green that I had.

After that it was ading the trucks along with 1 1/4 ounces of weight to get it to NMRA standards.

Con-Cor is still selling HO scale cars, however the PS-2 hopper are not currently something they offer. And the couplers are now body mounted. It really is a rather nice basic car and will be a nice addition to the road.

Thanks for stopping by and we’ll see you next week. Stay safe and Happy Railroading…