When MTH came out with their RailKing crane car in Penn Central paint I had to have one, even though I run strictly scale. I figured it was pretty close to scale, but it did have some issues that needed to be addressed. The car had an overall "High Water" look. This was due to the ride height and the distance between the body and chassis. The smoke stack was also too tall for my taste. It also has roller bearing trucks where the real thing had friction bearing trucks.
Working from photographs from several different sources, I came up with a plan to convert this toy-like car into a respectable model.
I started by disassembling everything as far as I could. I removed the factory truck bolsters and constructed new one out of sheet styrene. This lowered the height by about 1/8" I installed new MTH Premier Bettendorf trucks. Lowering the cab was a little more work. I sanded the protrusion on the die cast chassis for the cab mount flush with the bass. I then had to remove the same amount of material from the cab mounting stud. The stack was shortened to suite my taste. Everything was then weathered to make it look like a piece of neglected ROW equipment. The modified crane is 16 scale feet tall from the top of the rails to the top of the stack. It blends well with my scale equipment.
I had originally intended to add lights and a smoke unit to the car, but decided against it when I got it opened up. I would have had to do quite a bit of re-engineering to make those features possible. Overall, the end result is a pretty good rendition of a 120 to 150 ton Industrial Brownhoist wrecking crane used by many railroads from the 1920's to the 1980's
Tom
