Silver Streak Four-Wheel Caboose WM
Before we start with the first review I need to answer the question: Why bother evaluating a kit that has been out of production for decades? The answer to that is a story unto itself…
When I was a kid in the ‘60’s my father had a model railroad. He also had five children and found himself without the time to build one, and as mother was a realtor we moved every couple years and he’d have to start again. He had pretty much given up on model railroading when my oldest brother took up the torch and started building railroads. Unfortunately his dreams were larger than his hands and we would end up with massive double-folded waterwings having a mainline that barely worked and a yard that didn’t work before tearing it down to move to another house. I remember one railroad had a major grade (laid out mainly on an 8’ long piece of 2*8) that passed over the back of a toilet.
At another house the railroad took up half a two-car garage with a car in the other half and needless to say, in Chicago the seasons were very hard on the railroad as the tracks expanded and contracted. Also, any time someone bumped the table that stuck out into the middle of the garage it would ruin the 18” inside curve and the 2-8-8-2 mallet would derail.
I took up model railroading with him, but enjoyed making things more than running trains. I built a General from Tyco, a Pacific from Mantua that jinked and a wharf from Campbell. Then my brother grew up and moved out of the house after getting a job for the Illinois Central. Since he took the railroad with him and I moved on to wargaming he took my railroad stuff with him.
Now it is 40 years later and I’m facing retirement. I've started model railroading again and plan on building as much of the stuff on the table besides the track as I can (I’m using Kato Unitrack). The layout is a simple loop with a roundhouse and yard in the middle to store the trains I build. Since I started I’ve built another Tyco General and a Mantua camelback Mikado I cadged off Ebay and refurbished the Pacific my brother had saved for 40 years (it runs better now than it ever did).
When I looked for a caboose to go with the Mikado I wanted something equally challenging. I remembered the old wood and metal kits from before plastic took over the market completely and started looking for them. Lo and behold, here is the Silver Streak Four-Wheel Caboose- Western Maryland 929-179, still unopened in the box (I must confess, I intended to purchase a blank one that I could paint it up for the Lehigh Valley to match the Mikado, but oops. It is missing the cupola and it seemed wrong somehow to paint away the roadline after the car sat in a box for 50 years, waiting for someone to build it.)
On to the review: This kit consists of a wood floor and roof, metal ends, platforms and truck and prepainted and decaled wood sides. All the detail is either metal or wood, except the clear plastic window glass and the plastic wheels with metal axles. The most complicated parts to assemble as designed are the ladders, and frankly all the pictures of WM bobbers I found showed simpler ladders but I planned on building it out of the box and that’s how it came, with the rails extending over the top of the roof. The ladder was stamped out of thin metal and I doubt it’s possible to get it perfectly straight, so mine are both bowed a little, one in and the other out. The hand rails are all pre-bent which is good because otherwise it would be impossible to get them right. There is no interior provided.
Now, the biggest fault with this kit is the end pieces. They both came out of the box warped, badly enough that if you attempted to use them as is there would be a huge gap on the sides and the platforms wouldn’t fit right. The metal looks like lead, the type used to cast toy soldiers but it’s actually pot metal. What that means is the metal doesn’t bend at all. In fact it has tiny cracks in it before you even start working on it and any attempt to change its shape results in pieces breaking off. And you can’t build the kit without the end pieces fitting.
So, at this point you have three choices: You could sweep the whole thing into the trash, cursing yourself for wasting money on a crappy old railroad car kit; you could scratchbuild the end caps out of plastic or wood and cardstock, cursing yourself for wasting money on a crappy old railroad car kit; or you could do what I did, which was curse myself for wasting money on a crappy old railroad car kit then ‘fix’ the end pieces. There are shoulders on the top and bottom of the sides to hold the floor and ceiling, I used a Dremel to make a relief cut in the center, then I laid the piece face down on the table and pushed down gently in the center until it broke in half. Then I glued it back together approximately flat. The cracks don’t generally follow the wood pattern, so when painting I globbed some extra in the cracks to hide them. For the most part it worked.
After that the contest is to finish assembly before the metal breaks up so badly you can’t glue it back together anymore. By the way, except the truck, which is decent metal of some sort or other all the rest of the castings are the same pot metal, and I had to break one of the platforms in half to unwarp it too.
Speaking of the truck, I replaced the provided wheels with steel, and the caboose seemed to run pretty well, except there’s enough slop sometimes the wheels touched the frame and shorted out the layout. I took it apart and installed plastic wheels provided, it still runs fine. Also, the truck is glued to the bottom of the caboose, meaning you can’t take it apart. It would have been nice if it were screwed in instead.
Other than the pot metal (and by the way, when you have to drill out the holes for the hand rails let your drill do all the work. If you push at all the metal will break on you) assembly of this kit is straightforward for someone with experience, and the instructions extremely well written and illustrated; this is quite a treat after some of the tank kits I assembled for wargaming, where the instructions were written by someone whose English looked like they used Google Translate. The back of the instruction sheet contains individual instructions for six different bobber cabooses all using the same base parts but for different painted sides and a cupola if needed.
The kit also provided decent painting instructions with Floquil paint colors, though without a picture. Fortunately there are conversion charts for now-defunct Floquil colors on the internet, as well as pictures of actual Western Maryland cabooses. (It’s kind of funny to take advantage of a modern convenience like a computer to help build a piece of model railroading history.) The paint actually filled in many of the cracks in the end walls, but there are still noticeable gaps where the sides meet the ends.
All in all a fun and challenging kit to build. I can’t wait to get another one. I’m afraid though, that if this caboose ever drops to the floor there won’t be enough of the pot metal pieces left to rescue.
Before we start with the first review I need to answer the question: Why bother evaluating a kit that has been out of production for decades? The answer to that is a story unto itself…
When I was a kid in the ‘60’s my father had a model railroad. He also had five children and found himself without the time to build one, and as mother was a realtor we moved every couple years and he’d have to start again. He had pretty much given up on model railroading when my oldest brother took up the torch and started building railroads. Unfortunately his dreams were larger than his hands and we would end up with massive double-folded waterwings having a mainline that barely worked and a yard that didn’t work before tearing it down to move to another house. I remember one railroad had a major grade (laid out mainly on an 8’ long piece of 2*8) that passed over the back of a toilet.
At another house the railroad took up half a two-car garage with a car in the other half and needless to say, in Chicago the seasons were very hard on the railroad as the tracks expanded and contracted. Also, any time someone bumped the table that stuck out into the middle of the garage it would ruin the 18” inside curve and the 2-8-8-2 mallet would derail.
I took up model railroading with him, but enjoyed making things more than running trains. I built a General from Tyco, a Pacific from Mantua that jinked and a wharf from Campbell. Then my brother grew up and moved out of the house after getting a job for the Illinois Central. Since he took the railroad with him and I moved on to wargaming he took my railroad stuff with him.
Now it is 40 years later and I’m facing retirement. I've started model railroading again and plan on building as much of the stuff on the table besides the track as I can (I’m using Kato Unitrack). The layout is a simple loop with a roundhouse and yard in the middle to store the trains I build. Since I started I’ve built another Tyco General and a Mantua camelback Mikado I cadged off Ebay and refurbished the Pacific my brother had saved for 40 years (it runs better now than it ever did).
When I looked for a caboose to go with the Mikado I wanted something equally challenging. I remembered the old wood and metal kits from before plastic took over the market completely and started looking for them. Lo and behold, here is the Silver Streak Four-Wheel Caboose- Western Maryland 929-179, still unopened in the box (I must confess, I intended to purchase a blank one that I could paint it up for the Lehigh Valley to match the Mikado, but oops. It is missing the cupola and it seemed wrong somehow to paint away the roadline after the car sat in a box for 50 years, waiting for someone to build it.)
On to the review: This kit consists of a wood floor and roof, metal ends, platforms and truck and prepainted and decaled wood sides. All the detail is either metal or wood, except the clear plastic window glass and the plastic wheels with metal axles. The most complicated parts to assemble as designed are the ladders, and frankly all the pictures of WM bobbers I found showed simpler ladders but I planned on building it out of the box and that’s how it came, with the rails extending over the top of the roof. The ladder was stamped out of thin metal and I doubt it’s possible to get it perfectly straight, so mine are both bowed a little, one in and the other out. The hand rails are all pre-bent which is good because otherwise it would be impossible to get them right. There is no interior provided.
Now, the biggest fault with this kit is the end pieces. They both came out of the box warped, badly enough that if you attempted to use them as is there would be a huge gap on the sides and the platforms wouldn’t fit right. The metal looks like lead, the type used to cast toy soldiers but it’s actually pot metal. What that means is the metal doesn’t bend at all. In fact it has tiny cracks in it before you even start working on it and any attempt to change its shape results in pieces breaking off. And you can’t build the kit without the end pieces fitting.
So, at this point you have three choices: You could sweep the whole thing into the trash, cursing yourself for wasting money on a crappy old railroad car kit; you could scratchbuild the end caps out of plastic or wood and cardstock, cursing yourself for wasting money on a crappy old railroad car kit; or you could do what I did, which was curse myself for wasting money on a crappy old railroad car kit then ‘fix’ the end pieces. There are shoulders on the top and bottom of the sides to hold the floor and ceiling, I used a Dremel to make a relief cut in the center, then I laid the piece face down on the table and pushed down gently in the center until it broke in half. Then I glued it back together approximately flat. The cracks don’t generally follow the wood pattern, so when painting I globbed some extra in the cracks to hide them. For the most part it worked.
After that the contest is to finish assembly before the metal breaks up so badly you can’t glue it back together anymore. By the way, except the truck, which is decent metal of some sort or other all the rest of the castings are the same pot metal, and I had to break one of the platforms in half to unwarp it too.
Speaking of the truck, I replaced the provided wheels with steel, and the caboose seemed to run pretty well, except there’s enough slop sometimes the wheels touched the frame and shorted out the layout. I took it apart and installed plastic wheels provided, it still runs fine. Also, the truck is glued to the bottom of the caboose, meaning you can’t take it apart. It would have been nice if it were screwed in instead.
Other than the pot metal (and by the way, when you have to drill out the holes for the hand rails let your drill do all the work. If you push at all the metal will break on you) assembly of this kit is straightforward for someone with experience, and the instructions extremely well written and illustrated; this is quite a treat after some of the tank kits I assembled for wargaming, where the instructions were written by someone whose English looked like they used Google Translate. The back of the instruction sheet contains individual instructions for six different bobber cabooses all using the same base parts but for different painted sides and a cupola if needed.
The kit also provided decent painting instructions with Floquil paint colors, though without a picture. Fortunately there are conversion charts for now-defunct Floquil colors on the internet, as well as pictures of actual Western Maryland cabooses. (It’s kind of funny to take advantage of a modern convenience like a computer to help build a piece of model railroading history.) The paint actually filled in many of the cracks in the end walls, but there are still noticeable gaps where the sides meet the ends.
All in all a fun and challenging kit to build. I can’t wait to get another one. I’m afraid though, that if this caboose ever drops to the floor there won’t be enough of the pot metal pieces left to rescue.