So I went touring Cabin Fever's 11/16 auction, and a couple of things caught my eye. Actually it was three things.
First one was a several-year-old MTH Premier full length Santa Fe vista dome. Full disclosure--I already have the last premier Santa Fe set MTH released before the tooling was sold to Atlas. A full ten-car train (including a full dome), set to be pulled by my ATSF 2903 Northern. So why acquire more cars? A separate project of mine was to build an Amtrak Exhibit Train. I already have the locomotives, but the cars would need to be repaints of existing coaches, sleepers, baggage cars and an Amfleet cafe car for the store, and the Santa Fe passenger cars would be the easiest to redecorate, either for me or (more likely) a professional custom painter like CJB. So rather than buy boxed sets, I was acquiring "surplus" unboxed MTH coaches from York vendor RPO Trains (now known as Uncle Jack's Trains), and over the course of several York shows I came into enough of the ATSF versions that it became feasible to build another ATSF consist beyond the proposed Exhibit Train, hence my interest in that single full-length dome.
The car in question was only the third lot of the auction, and had up to the day of closing, had not received many bids, the top bid being under $40. That is, right up till about 15 or so minutes before auction close when I put in my max bid of $90. Someone else really wanted that car, because I was immediately outbid, jacking up the price to $100. A quick tour of Ebay showed I could find a few examples of similar ATSF dome cars for less than that bid (once packing, shipping and premium was figured in), so I let that bidder have the car.
I had better luck with the second and third lots, because they didn't look all that impressive. Two lots of six assorted tank cars, "some with missing or loose details". As lots #71 and #72, they were high up in the chain of the 636-lot auction and would also be an early close, not subject to a whole lot of the "bid competition" effect I described in a other recent Cabin Fever thread. No manufacturer or product numbers were given, and they looked like Weaver tankers, being of two different sizes, and five of them were duplicate roadnames and numbers. The top bids at the time were in the $30-$40 range, so like the ATSF dome, they seemed to have garnered little interest. But something bothered me about my initial assertion. The trucks didn't look like Weaver roller-bearing trucks --Weaver used solid sintered-iron wheels to the best of my knowledge, and these were hollow on the back face. So I took one of the reporting marks + road number and looked them up in Google Images.
They were K-Line.
And being modern frameless tankers, that meant they were top-of-the-line aluminum K-Line tankers. Earlier in this thread (as in, page 288), I showed photos of a pair of K-Line Citgo aluminum tankers I won in the 8/10 auction, and mentioned that there was another lot that contained three more of these in different road numbers that I lost out on. With that in mind, I put in max bids of $90 on both lots. One lot escalated to $70, the other to $50. No other bids appeared, and I won both Auction close and billing was Wedensday, shipping was billed on Saturday, and shipping commenced on Monday, arriving the next day. All of these cars were unboxed, (meaning lots of bubble wrap and an absolute blizzard of static-charged packing peanuts ), incurring a combined pack & ship fee of around $55 and arrived in a 24x16x12 Uline box cut down to 24x16x10" and weighing 19 pounds according to the UPS label.
So what's in the box? Tankerpalooza! Captions reference the photo above them:
Lacking boxes and thus product numbers, I had to do some research to find out what to call these. First off are these two: K6341-8011 Hooker Chemicals and K6341-8014 TankTrain.
Next up are these two Santa Fe cars: K6341-1051 and K6341-1052. The white stripe denotes diesel fuel and the red stripe denoted gasoline. These were part of a set of four that also included a yellow-striped car (k6341-1053) labeled "Car Journal Oil", and a fourth green-striped car (presumably K6341-1054?) whose commodity is unknown since I couldn't find a photo of it outside of an old Walthers page showing the four-pack in low-resolution Supposedly the 4-pac was numbered K6341-1051-1.
(Edit 04/27/23: Worthpoint and Legacy station have clear photos of the green-stripe K6341-1054 (both already sold). Commodity is "Water Only" Also, I have secured the K6341-1053. Still looking for the 1054)
(Edit 10/17/23: I have secured the K6341-1054. Set complete.)
Next are these two Burlington Northern tankers, K90014. A review of one of my old YouTube videos confirms I have one of these already from when they were first issued. Won't be the first duplicates in my collection
Here is K-6333-8015 Archer Daniels Midland. I was going to photograph it next to one of the SP tankers, keeping with the 2-per-photo pattern above, but abandoned that when it turned out that adding one of the larger cars made the pair too long to photograph at the same size, so I just shoved them over to put the shorter car in the center. This car is an in-between size (probably indicated by its being in the K6333 series). It's longer than the previous cars and the tank itself is wider (same width as the long cars pictured below)
next up are three K6334-2031 Southern Pacific 50' tankers. Unfortunately all three are the same road number (I don't know if K-Line ever made these in any other roadnumbers). You probably won't notice that as they roll by in a train, since by the time I get to put these in a video, you'll have long forgotten I mentioned this and won't be looking for it I stacked all three together in one photo to make it clear these were three duplicate cars and not one photo repeated 3x
"We all live in the yellow tanker-ine..." <BRICK>
Above is a K6334-8016 Saftey-Kleen 50' tanker. This one was probably responsible for the listing's designation of "loose/missing details", as its side railings arrived sprung out of the platforms. Fortunately I was able to re-fasten them (they snap into small slots where they join the end platforms). The small stanchions holding them away from the tank body are a bit more mysterious as to how they're fastened (if at all) They're in-place on this photo, but at least one of the SP cars above still have them hanging loose. Two cars are missing one of the top railings and at least half of them had to be shoved back into their mounting holes on the platform, a fiddly task that hasn't really anchored them very securely. Time to get out the calipers and figure out what size of stiff wire can replicate the missing railings (probably easier than finding out if Brasseur has them in their parts list, which for K-Line numbers 1645 items)
Lastly, here's the K6334-8017 Cardox 50' tanker.
It just now occurs to me that I have a metric buttload of tank cars. Between modern frameless ones like these, the older transition era tankers, and all the chrome-plated ones, I'm almost certain to have passed 100 examples by now. That's a whole lotta scale model explodium
One more thing!
It appears that all of these cars came from the same collection. Or maybe just a majority of them. Eight of the twelve cars had these little "inventory number" stickers on the bottom. Could the "TT" indicate "Train Tracker"? I don't know if the application has such a feature, as I've never used or researched it. maybe someone reading my long-winded post will know.
---PCJ (bringing you another post that took two hours to write )
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