Tank cars

Well, inspired in part by some tank castings I just received from modeler Tom Madden, based on an article by Tony Thompson, I've been building some tank cars this week. The other reason I've jumped into these now is that I'm building the P2k ones I had on my shelf, and these are cars I feel comfortable building without making any modifications at this time. Most of the other cars (box cars in particular), I'm finding I want to make modifications  as I build them. Usually running boards, adding missing details, etc.

While the theory is that I'll build styrene kits as is, to match the RTR versions I have, and I'll make modifications later when it comes time for weathering the cars, in many cases it's tough to do that.

So, in the last four evenings I've built five kits, and have two more about 75% done. The first five were all Time Saver kits, which helped. These two, plus an additional four I plan to complete this week, are full kits.

Not all is perfect, I've found it quite difficult to get the hand rail installed without it being wavy. I'll decide later if it's worth replacing. My guess is I won't do that until I've completed a few kitbashes or resin kits where I have no choice but to do the hand rail myself.

So here they are so far -