Some more CFA auction wins, unrelated to the MTH warehouse for once Everything in this post came from a single lot. and for once, I got out to the driveway with the sun angle just right to light up the cars without undue shadows or late-afternoon yellow-ish light. (like what happened when I re-shot the first batch of European passenger cars last week along with the MTH warehouse cars...I replaced the original photos in that post as they were too dark for my taste)
Captions reference the photos above them. [Previous]-[Next] links at the bottom navigate to other photo posts I've made in this thread.
Lionel 6-17905 ADM tanker. This one sat in what I believe to be a store window for a long time going by the condition of the box. No placards found though...although being a corn-syrup (non-hazmat) tanker I wonder if they were ever included. There's a price sticker on the box indicating $76.50. A quick looksee shows this car currently going for $23-40 used. The auction win+premium+shipping came to $62.94, so I think buying all these separate via dealers/Ebay would come out a bit more if you consider shipping from individual vendors. These weren't the reason I went after this lot though.
Lionel 6-9856 Old Milwaukee reefer from 1975 according to the BLT. This is my first MPC reefer. I've never sought these out as a category, but it was part of the lot. The red/white Lionel box was in pretty decent condition, not shopworn-looking at all. The $39 price sticker indicates it probably passed through a few retailers since manufacture
A close-up of the reefer door showing how the plug-door effect is accomplished on these cars. The spring inside the track pushes the door into the pocket as it is slid shut.
6-9116 Domino/Amstar quad hopper from 1974. Believe it or not, it's only the third Lionel quad hopper in my collection (I do have two or three Menards versions). Also with a red/white Lionel box in very good condition considering it's right around 50-years old, it carried a price sticker of the same style as the reefer above for $27, so it's almost certain to have come from the same retailer.
K-Line K-6850 boom tender. I have a CSX version and a crane to go with it. No crane to accompany this one. Maybe the postwar one I acquired in the estate sale a few years ago...but then again there's the postwar work caboose for that one. Ah well, part and parcel of auction lots. This car for some reason is as dirty as the photo suggests. The box window is detached along the bottom, but that alone wouldn't really account for all that dust. This car's box carries a price sticker indicating it was put on sale (wherever that was) on 5/31/2016, for $15
K-Line K-90004. KCC Christmas boxcar from 1993. I think I might have one of these already, being that I was in the KCC from Day One, and have a decent chunk of the released KCC cars all the way to the end. One day I'm going to put them all in one train for giggles. This car came from the same retailer as the boom tender above, carrying a price sticker for $19.50 when it was put on sale 4/11/2014. Oh, and there's two reasons why I left the trucks turned in -- One, they're so tight to the body I didn't want to risk chewing up the bottom of the car (or breaking something) to get the couplers facing out and two, the styrofoam insert for the car is shaped to require that the trucks face inward. That's just plain dumb
Like I mentioned, at least some of these cars looked to have come from a storefront, going by the severely sun-bleached boxes shown here, both the front and left-end of the box.
Now by this point, given my other entries in BACL, you might be wondering what was it that made me go after this lot? It seems to consist entirely of generic freight cars that have nothing in common with the rest of my collection. So far, you'd be right. The actual reason this lot caught my attention is the cars below:
Oh no...more European cars . Two of them were inexplicably in this lot. They were probably tossed in as there weren't any other lots they fit in with. Even the lot desciption was mis-categorized as "HO scale". So I get to add Rivarossi to the list of manufacturers represented in my collection. This is another UIC 2-axle gondola, or "Belgian Open Goods Wagon"of the state-owned railway SNCB/NMBS, catalog number 7561. I did say awhile back that I was looking for at least one more of these, thinking I was going to equip them with an AHM knuckle-coupler conversion on one end and let them serve as "adapter wagons" for whenever I stick some of this oddball rolling stock on the end of a regular train. You know, for giggles
Same car, pictured with its box. The end flaps open downward, and this example insisted on demonstrating that by flopping open at every opportunity. Not so fun given that box insert (a polystyrene tray) is missing, allowing the car to roll about inside. I'll have to make up something out of styrofoam with my hot-wire scroll table.
Second of the two, also a UIC 2-axle "goods wagon", described as a "Type E" as is its catalog mate. This one is number 7560 of one of the Italian railway operators (the markings don't make it clear which one). A previous owner cut off the buffers on this one. I can't imagine these cars negotiating curves sharp enough to induce "buffer lock" (owing to their wheelbase), so the purpose of their removal remains a mystery.
Showing both cars with their respective boxes
I hadn't talked about this one before, but I got it from Ebay just before York. Currently it's holding the Mini-Commander and pickup rollers I hope to one day install within the British class 33 diesel I showed along with my MTH Challenger a few pages back. This is a Lima two-axle UIC 'open goods wagon' lettered for the French national railway SNCF, catalog number 6724 (yes, it'll get a clean-up).
The three wagons together. Now I have a total of four. That should be enough XD.
Being that one of these cars was missing its box insert, I wondered briefly if I was putting the proper car in the insert. I say "briefly" because the car didn't fit. Whaaaa? It wasn't till I took a closer look and compared the three that I found that one of the Rivarossi cars (the one that actually did fit) was actually a different model. I used to think Rivarossi had acquired some Lima tooling at some point (hearkening back to the Ebay lot I passed on thanks to its pair of "duplicate" Spatenbrau 2-axle reefers), but this car makes it clear Rivarossi went their own way with similar (but better detailed / proportioned) cars to its competitor Lima (they also had their own O scale UIC passenger cars, longer than the Lima ones). These comparison photos show Rivarossi on the bottom, a Lima on top. Note the discrepancy in carbody length...
Looking at the underside makes the difference even starker. Both cars came in Rivarossi boxes, so a head-scratcher there, until...
Then looking closely at the underframe, you can see the top car has "LIMA ITALY" molded into its underside, while the more detailed one has "Rivarossi Italy" molded in. This changes the identity of the top wagon to Lima, making the Rivarossi box into a substitute that happened to sort-of fit -- possibly explaining why the interior tray was MIA as the car didn't fit it. Consulting my 1976 Lima catalogue (I found a hard copy on Ebay) identifies this car as Lima #6722, marked for the Societa Veneta Ferrovie although some inscriptions don't exactly match. So that's how I'll identify it in my electronic records once I get around to adding these cars to the database. But I still have that one actual Rivarossi, regardless.
---PCJ
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