This weeks freight car is another ACF 3 bay hopper. It is from Accurate Finishings Inc. Actually I thought the car itself was from again, Front Range Products, as it was the same as last weeks cars and it had their stampings on the car. I figured Accurate Finishings was like Bev Bel from the late 70’s, early 80’s. Bev Bel would buy undecorated Athearn cars and do limited runs with them.
Started doing a little research so as to give you a little background. Wow, what a rabbit hole that was. Tried googling Acccurate Finishings and all I got back were old kits for sale. Either online stores or Ebay. Tried it again with the mailing address and that where it got confusing and interesting.
With the mailing address I got two things. First was some patent application numbers/dates. The second thing that popped up was Accurail. Thought that it was kind of weird and then I noticed that the mailing addresses were the same. Further research turned up that after Front Range Products went under, Accurail bought a bunch of their molds.
Without contacting Accurail I not sure of the actual connection between Accurate Finishings and Accurail. But, I’m going to go with Accurate Finishings being a division of Accurail doing limited runs of cars and it didn’t work out.
The car itself is just like the cars I talked about last week except that the weight for the car was now a one piece stamped steel plate instead of two smaller ones. With the new one piece weight the car came in at exactly 4 1/2 oz as recommended by the NMRA RP-20.1 weight standard.
The only problem with the kit was the trucks were warped. Not sure if they originally came like this or they warped over time. Fortunately I had a pair of 100 ton trucks on hand to replace them with. Additionally, the supplied scale couplers had to go.
The models info.
And the finished car.
If interested, there are a lot of Accurate Finishing cars available. On Ebay there were quite a few different hoppers for smaller roads, private industries and grain Co-ops. Also there are some box cars for again, smaller roads and industries.
Thanks for following along. I’ll see you next week.
Happy Railroading…