Tales of Modern PFE Reefers - Part 2

The next victim in the PFE marathon was an old Athearn 50ft mechanical reefer in Santa Fe scheme. Basically, the same car I used for my CN 50ft reefers a few weeks ago. Now, my idea was to try to make something closer to prototype and thus, Pacific Fruit Express imposed itself upon me. As with many older cars, I was well aware of certain detail and dimensional discrepancies. You have to live with them but as always, it's a way to learn more about the real history of freight cars.

The Athearn tooling isn't that bad, but as always, I remove the roofwalk in a heart beat and replace it with a custom length Tichy one. Grabirons were also completely replaced with metal ones but this time, I decided to keep the molded plastic stirrups for many reasons.

With some work, molded plastic stirrups can look good

Plastic stirrups generally are the biggest offenders since they spoil the car silhouette. However, you probably recall my experiment with Athearn 40ft boxcars 2 years or so ago. The idea was to keep them and thin them down with a hobby knife blade and files. It you are careful, you can remove quite a lot of material. You can also file the back corners at 45 degrees to make them appear shallow will keeping them sturdy.

Beside these pragmatic reasons, I also had other aesthetical reason to keep the stirrups. Indeed, the center stirrup ladder as a specific design. I could have replaced it with an Accurail one which is much thinner, but I didn't go that route because they are made of Delrin plastic. The previous PFE car was equipment with them and I found they were flimsy and paint chipped. Indeed, they are located where our fingers go to grab a car. So, I decided to not redo it. Since I was keeping the central ladder, I thought it would look better to keep them all. Mixing metal and plastic stirrups wouldn't have looked good.

The Athearn reefer framed by his two relatives

Another thing that was in the back of my mind was the fact that PFE bright orange stirrups generally weather to an almost black color which helps to make them appear much thinner than they actually are. So, that was just another reason to keep them.

Other details that I added were the end platform, a Kadee brake wheel and scratchbuilt fuel tank under the car. The reefer was painted in SP Daylight Orange with a few drop of Reefer Yellow, once again using Tru-Color paints.

Decals were easier to figure out than the 40ft ice reefer, but I still had to fudge the Pacific Fruit Express lettering to fit a non-ribbed car. When done, everything was sealed and the car was a done deal. It's certainly not a great model, but it now blends within the fleet and that attractive paint scheme really do the job. Next time, we will cover the last reefer in that series... and prepare yourself for a good laugh!