Gunderson doublestack repair project.

I've collected several different sets of doublestack container cars over the past year, along with various different brands of containers, most of which have been languishing in an A4 file box in the loft.

Most of the cars have been bought secondhand, and many of them are damaged or missing parts.  Today I began the process of sorting out the various parts and repairing the cars ready for use.  I had three five-car sets of Athearn Gunderson well cars (although one set is missing a car).

This first set was a bring-and-buy bargain from the NMRA Bournemouth Belle convention back in October.  I picked them up for only £8, a great price although most of the detail parts are broken.

The other two sets were a job-lot on ebay, although one of the intermediate cars is missing and - again - most of the detail parts have snapped off and one of the trucks was sheared off, these cars came with a selection of containers and were a very cheap set because of the damage.

I had invested in six sets of these replacement parts on ebay a few weeks ago, although in hindsight I should probably have bought a few more as I used up all the handrail pieces refurbishing the three sets of cars.

I also picked up some replacement wheels, a couple of sets of Proto 2000 and a set of Intermountain wheels.  These all-metal wheels are much better quality than the plastic sets that came with the cars.

This image shows the typical damage that the cars had sustained over the years, most of them had broken steps or partially missing handrails, brake-wheels and other details.

The work to repair the cars is fairly straight-forward, beginning with the removal of the broken steps.  The steps are located using holes pre-drilled in the car sides, and spigots on the underside of the end cars.

I used a craft knife and a chisel to carve off any remaining glue or plastic on the underside of the platforms.

The holes for the side ladders were blocked with glue or broken spigots on most of the cars, so a quick twist with a small jewellers screwdriver soon cleared them ready for the new steps to be attached.

I also used the jewellers screwdriver to push out the broken pins from the missing brakewheels, clearing the mounting holes for the replacement parts.

The wheels were replaced on all the cars, with both the Proto 2000 and Intermountain wheels proving to be an easy swap.  The image above shows the new wheels on the lower car and the old rusty athearn wheels on the upper car.

The Athearn kit uses three different sizes of screw, and using the wrong size can result in damage to the spigot that joins each car to it's neighbour.  The picture above shows one of the spigots before I replaced the mount section.  The light coloured plastic around the base of the spigot is a stress fracture caused by the previous owner of the cars assembling the truck with one of the longer screws instead of the short screws provided by Athearn.

With all the parts replaced, the cars are once again fully-detailed and ready to enter service.  I've also been collecting suitable shipping containers whenever I saw a job lot or cheap 'buy it now' on ebay, so I've been able to add loads to most of the cars.

I used a combination of Athearn, Walthers and another unidentified brand.  Unfortunately they are not inter-compatible so I had to redrill the mounting holes on some of the brands to get them to play nicely together.  The cars are secured using small blobs of CA as I don't intend to remove them.

When I examined some of the containers I had in my parts box were older designs or slightly different sizes, so I opted to leave them for another project.  That means I will need to invest in a few more containers to fill the rest of the cars.

After a couple of hours work, I have a fourteen car Gunderson train ready to take to the rails.  These were only a few of the cars I have in my intermodal crate, there are still about another six stand-alone well cars and two five-car Maersk sets to be worked on.  The Maersk sets will be used to recreate the promotional Maersk train from the early 90's and will need Maersk containers.

I'm going to add weathering to these sets in the spring, when the outside temperature is a little more friendly for airbrushing.  I really must look into getting a spraybooth one of these days!

I've also got some unpainted Athearn gunderson cars which I plan to paint at some point, one of them will be used to fill out the four-car set seen in these pictures.