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Here is the finished car on Gary Lenhoff's Eastern Missouri Railway layout. The prototype cars have a 140-ton capacity, which allows them to carry two M1 Abrams tanks or M88 Hercules recovery vehicles per flatcar. These are the only DODX flatcars capable of this, and are also a specialized design, with features such as full-length tie-down channels and six-wheel Buckeye trucks. I decided to scratchbuild one of these in HO scale to make for an interesting load on the head end of my freight trains. This car is built from sheet Plastruct styrene, select channels and angles, and a few aftermarket parts, such as Athearn trucks and a Details West brake lever. It is finished off in Polly Scale Southern Sylvan green with decals I printed on my ALPS printer. The tanks are Roco Minitanks M1A2 Abramses, finished in Polly Scale desert sand. |
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| This is the underframe of the unfinished car. Most of the brake detail was "fudged" because prototype pictures were somewhat difficult to come by and I could not find any plans for these cars. |
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| This is what the car looked like before painting. The vehicle sitting on it is a Roco M88 that is undergoing conversion to an M88A2 Hercules. Perhaps I will build another one of these cars to carry that load... |
