Currently, I think I have 40 chrome-plated tank cars.
That's clearly not enough despite earlier statements to the contrary as I found three more I didn't have.
As usual, descriptive text lies below their respective photos:
We start with this 30-73293 Tidewater tanker. I ran across this by a YouTube recommendation to the channel "Trains in the Valley" a dealer in PA who had acquired a sizable collection of MTH pieces and made a series of videos showcasing portions of the acquisition, test-running the locomotives and checking the lighting of cabooses, as well as a close out-of-box examination of regular rolling stock. One of these pieces was the above tank car. Or rather another example of it.
I thought I had a chrome Tidewater tanker, though. Rummaging through my older posts in this thread I found that I did indeed have a chrome Tidewater tanker -- the single-dome version that was a starter-set exclusive via a Cabin Fever MTH warehouse auction. I emailed TitV to see if they still had it, since the video was posted in March of this year, and I only saw it in August. They checked their stock, spread over two locations, but alas, that specific car had already been sold. Pity I didn't spot it earlier, as the only other example that turned up in a Google search was on Ebay, and it was priced like it was known that no one else had it (actually almost everything listed by said seller was priced like that). So I sat on it, ultimately biting the bullet owing to the two others below...
Shamrock tanker, 30-73294. A few days after running across the Tidewater car it occurred to me to look it up on MTH's site, then pull up the catalog listing in order to look up adjacent product numbers, which revealed this car. I placed it on my watchlist, and a couple of days later got a discount offer from the seller, which I jumped on. There must've been a four-leaf clover hiding behind that logo because of the next car:
30-73309 Alaska tanker. In my search of adjacent product numbers, I ran across some more chrome tankers that I thought seemed familiar, but didn't show up in my incomplete inventory. A trip to the basement proved that I had the RK Borden's car, as well as the UP and RF&P triple-dome cars. While wondering how I missed some of these cars It occurred to me that during the time I was buying them as they were released, I was only buying petroleum-company roadnames, then expanded to railroad ones. It wasn't till the bug bit that I started filling in the gaps that approach had left.
Searching more adjacent product numbers turned up the Alaska car, which I found on the site of a sizable dealer who is often the go-to for oddball items. After placing this on my watchlist from their Ebay presence, I thought to look up other examples of this car number and saw one other seller offering the same car at a similar price. Similar, that is till I put it on my watchlist and subsequently received a discount offer from that seller. Well, lightning doesn't often strike twice in the same place ('cause the place usually doesn't exist the second time around 
), so I snapped this one up too.
It was at this point that I also bit the bullet on the Tidewater car. Expensive for what it is, yes, but it led me to discounted finds on two other cars I wasn't aware of. Converging on my location from Long Island, Pennsylvania and Arkansas, all via USPS the first two arrived the same day, the third came a day later. I took advantage of an hours-long lull between slow-moving thunderstorms today to shoot these photos outdoors, and while there are still some dark reflections in the chrome, they are much less evident than on the ones shot indoors.
---PCJ
(Nav links redacted...Forum rule disallows crosslinking one's posts within a thread)
(yes, I still know about the Coors light, Budweiser and Harley Davidson ones. Still not feeling those for some reason)
