Background:
So, one day between this spring's York and today, I came into a set of O scale Atlas/Roco freight cars from the 1970's by way of an estate sale. I took eight cars off the hands of the recipient, a train club a friend of mine is a member of. After making the pickup, I was informed that the club also had a bunch of similar AHM O scale cars. Initially I was uninterested due to their funky hook couplers that were only compatible with...each other. But a little research revealed that AHM had also made conversion couplers that would allow them to mate up with the Atlas/Roco cars (as well as Lionel and Kadee).
Fortunately a Google images search revealed an Ebay seller who still had a supply of these, so I acquired a few packs, while signalling to my friend that I was game for about half the cars in the possession of the club (the rest were duplicates).
A little more research showed that AHM only made three roadnames of a 40' boxcar, 40' plug-door boxcar, gondola and flatcar (I'm ignoring the bobber cabooses, but one is part of the selection coming from the club). Being that I will soon have examples of roughly half of AHM's O-scale models, I figured what the hey, it's only 6-7 more cars to have a more or less complete set, so I embarked on a tour of Ebay to gather up the other models (as well as some more conversion couplers), with the main requirement being that the boxes be included and in halfway decent-condition. This effort yielded seven examples, of which six are now in my possession with the seventh due the day after this posting.
This brings us to today's deliveries 
We all have or heard stories of less-than-train-savvy Ebay sellers packing their wares in a less-than optimal fashion. The least-secure shipment arrived yesterday inside a pair of bubble envelopes taped together, and the best of the bunch came surrounded by inch-thick styrofoam panels on all sides inside a box sized well enough to prevent movement. The last one, is the one I'm going to talk about. While it's true the carton and its contents arrived intact (I'm sure USPS babied it 
), the unwrapping of the boxes inside the carton took some time, as the packing job seems to have overlooked that they were dealing with 50+ year old cardstock as you'll see below:
Can you see the first source of consternation above?. Ooh, that packing tape is right on the box flap This took a fair bit of patience to slice the paper wrapping (made from ALDI shopping bags) into tabs I could hold onto while s-l-o-w-l-y pulling up the tape without pulling up any of the printed carton's surface, but I got it off.
Car #3. Odear...this one goes all the way across the end flap. What to do...
I could have just sliced off the tape and left it on the flap, but my earlier success prompted me to take the patient route once more -- gentle yet persistent pulling (at a glacial pace) while keeping a sharp eye out for any tearing:
And here it is completely removed. I fired up my phone's stopwatch function at the beginning of this pull. It took 5 and-a-half minutes to completely remove this from the box end, and as you can see on the tape, managed to get it all the way off without any part of the original cardboard tearing. Whew. Now, most of these boxes will need a little TLC (mostly re-attaching the clear windows and patching tears here and there), but at least they don't have packing tape stuck on them. The cars themselves? Pretty much like-new. The 13 AHM and 18 Atlas/Roco cars will eventually participate in a "plastic-wheel parade", which given their lack of weight would be an ideal task for my K-Line B&A Berk, owing to it's less-than-bulletproof drivetrain.
---PCJ
