Some stuff I scored at a recent Cabin Fever auction of MTH Warehouse items. Now, all but one of these pieces are run-of the mill starter-set cars, so nothing impressive about those. However, the cool part was in the speed at which CF got these out to me. Usually, the timeline goes like this:
Day 1: auction commences and concludes, after which the lots you've won are tallied up and you're e-mailed your invoice. Also Day 1: you recieve an email from their shipping partner allowing you to choose whether to pick up your items or have them shipped to you. Day 2: you'll get an email letting you know that your items are being readied for packing, and that the next message, sent via email and text message will allow you to pay for shipping/handling. Owing to the quantity of items in each auction (uaully around 600 lots), it can take awhile to get through them all. Day 5: Packing and shipping invoice. Assuming you pay the same day...Day 6: a tracking number is emailed and texted to you. Two days later (PA-NYC) I have the item in-hand.
In this case, the auction ended on Wedensday 8/31, and the items were on my doorstep Saturday 9/3. Impressive 
Now, on to the meat of the delivery. I've always wondered how MTH assigned product numbers (if any) to the rolling stock included in their starter sets (since they occasionally get broken up). I don't have a definitive answer to that, but various Ebay sellers are using a scheme consisting of the set number plus a suffix indicating boxcar (B), tank car(T) and caboose (C), the typical RailKing set consist. I had to do a bit of hunting around to match up the cars with their respective sets and their numbers, so I'm posting these hoping it'll be useful to someone, whether here, or eventually when they show up in Google Images. Captions reference the image above :
30-4244-1B: C&O double-door boxcar from the Pennsylvania Steam Freight set (2017)
30-4245-1B: Northern Pacific double-door boxcar from the Southern Pacific Steam freight set (2017)
30-4247-1B: RailBox double-door boxcar from the BNSF Diesel Freight set (2018). This one took awhile to search, as there are no images of this car on Google Images or Ebay listings at the time I'm posting. I had to pore through images of RailKing sets till I found this car posed in the lineup in front of the set box.
30-4245-1C: Southern Pacific bay-window caboose from the Southern Pacific Steam freight set (2017)
30-4249-1C: Norfolk Southern bay-window caboose from the Norfolk Southern Diesel Freight Set (2019). This caboose and the previous one made me re-think the origins of the undecorated bay-window caboose I won in the 10/30/21 warehouse auction detailed in the post "A RailKing Caboose kit"). These two cabooses have nowhere near as many parts as the unassembled one, leading me to believe it is actually a Premier caboose.
20-98090: Northern Pacific drop-bottom gondola. A Premier piece that snuck into the lot of starter-set cars 
Now we get to the real reason I bid on these lots...chrome-plated tank cars. There were three among the two lots I bid on. Also included in this group of photos is two more I got from Ebay, one I ran across (UP) while hunting for product number matches on Google Images, the other (ADM) I found on the seller's store after realizing he was dealing in set break-ups and may have others among his 4000-ish listings. The cars below only appear in starter sets to the best of my knowledge, and like the rest of the MTH cars in this post, were unboxed. I employed BCW-660 card boxes to store these 40'-ish cars without the excess room of the BCW-800s, and they even accomodate the smokestack on the cabooses, as well as the 10' width of the Premier gondola.
Also, I just noticed that the cars from steam headed sets have solid-bearing trucks, while the ones from diesel sets have roller-bearing trucks. Nice touch for a starter set
30-4244-1T: Gulf tanker from the Pennsylvania Steam Freight set (2017). Yes, it's missing a dome handrail. Might be able to find one on MTH parts someday. Lettering obscured in the reflection reads "GULF OIL COMPANY, PITTSBURGH, PA".
(Edit: 09/18/2022) While rummaging through my (still incomplete) collection records to figure out how many chrome tankers I already have I ran across a near-identical version of this car that appeared in the 2012 Rugged Rails catalog. The RR version has road number 10292 (this one is 10290) and is equipped with roller-bearing trucks.
30-4245-1T: Tidewater tanker, from the Southern Pacific Steam freight set (2017). "Tidewater" printed above the car number is obscured by the glare.
30-4248-1T: Archer Daniels Midland tanker. from the CSX Diesel Freight Set (2018). I ran across this one on Ebay after placing the NS car below on my watchlist, after realizing the seller was doing set break-ups and I looked through his selection of MTH tank cars.
30-4249-1T Norfolk Southern tank, from the Norfolk Southern Diesel Freight Set (2019).
30-4250-1T: Union Pacific tanker, part of the Union Pacific Diesel Freight Set (2019), and an Ebay purchase.
Now, what is the deal with all the chrome? Many years ago I decided to build a train comprised entirely of chrome-plated freight cars. Not sure what prompted this, it may have been a pair of prototypes being sold off by Williams at their York booth in 2007 that I picked up on a whim (they never went into production, and Williams had never been in the habit of keeping a production archive)
in any case, I had amassed a string of mostly tank cars done up like this, mostly from MTH, but also including four Lionel pieces (three of them MPC) as well as the aforementioned Williams samples. At first, I restricted my collecting to petroleum company roadnames, but as I came to the realization that was a pointless exercise being that any prototypicality went out the window with the chrome plating. I started snapping up all the shiny tankers I could find, a task that led me into a number of Cabin Fever auctions, Ebay, and finally one dealer in Greensburg, PA who had a whopping eight different examples of regular-production RK plated tankers, of which I placed an order for seven (leaving out the Coors Light for some reason). Those will be highlighted in another post since this one is long enough already.
As for the remaining chrome tankers I don't have? Among regular-issue cars, I'm aware of a Pennsylvania tanker (30-73221), a Killian's Irish Red (30-73239), Budweiser (30-73240), Harley Davidson (30-73220), Alaska (30-73222) and one Cargill car that is a starter-set exclusive, and has only one image on Google, part of a Kmart.com listing from this year that may well tie back to the same Ebay store where I got the UP and ADM cars, as the listing had the same wording as the dealer's own site). The Coors Light one? I'm wishy-washy on that, as it looks like it should go with the Silver Bullet set (which I have) even though it wouldn't look right hitched to it.
I don't yet have an accrurate count of how many cars this train will have when I get to run it, but it's likely at least 30 cars, and probaly more that that. I think I'll call it "Chromeapalooza" (because "King Chrome" is already taken, by both a rapper and a Canadian truck-parts store)
(Edit 09/16: ordered the Killian's, PRR and Alaska) (09/27: and now linked to the new photos)
(Edit 08/18/23) Discovered a triple-dome version of the Tidewater tanker. Investigating some leads
(Edit 09/10/23): Got the Tidewater, and two others
(Nav links redacted...Forum rule disallows crosslinking one's posts within a thread)
---PCJ
