Building a Pennsylvania Railroad F39 75' flatcar

I've posted once before about detailing Atlas Model RR Co's 50' flatcar to match cars used in the Pennsylvania Railroad's trailer train service. The F30d conversions were a fairly easy project, but this next one is not such a simple conversion. I won't tell you what to do piece-by-piece, but you should be able to build a fairly good model of the PRR's class F39c 75' trailer flatcars once you're done here.

You start with an ordinary 50' flatcar, and it doesn't matter if the car is an old, scratched-up, bad-running junk box item. You'll be completely rebuilding it. So first, take the car and disassemble it, removing the trucks, brake wheel, deck piece, and the metal weight. Take the underframe and cut it as shown by the red lines in the image below. This should give you two similar pieces, each with one end of the car and half of the center sill. You can cut off the details on the side of your end pieces, and discard both the side pieces (unless you'd like to salvage the molded on brake equipment and re-apply it to your new car.) You will keep the ends and center frame of the car, extend the frame, and rebuild everything else.










You will use a variety of hand-cut plastic pieces to build the ends of your 50' car into a complete 75' car. The easiest way to start is to get a piece of .040" thick sheet plastic with pre-cut board patterns on it to match the original flatcar's deck. Cut this to the same width as the end pieces, and make sure that when you install the end pieces on either end of the new deck, the entire car measures a scale 75' long (just under 5 5/8",) from frame end to frame end. This gives you the length you need; you can then cut pieces to fill in the gap in the center sill and make new sides.

From there, you can glue your 50' car's original weight to the bottom of your new 75' car, and add details like trailer hitches, side rails, brake wheels, bridge plates, and underframe ribs as you choose. You can use this image of the underside of my latest F39 car as a rough guide, or go to the link above for the original measured drawing of the F39. I re-used some pieces (brake wheel & weight,) in making parts for my new car, but you should choose how to build each individual part based on how exact a model you want.



















I painted the finished car with a PRR mineral red color, although I'm not sure that's what they used on the real thing. I added decals with simple white lettering, because the cars painted for Trailer Train Co. (TTX,) had very simple markings.









The final result looks quite nice. Like my budget F30d conversion, this is by no means an exact model-- but I bet you anyone who remembers the Pennsy's early trailer trains could recognize your model right away. Be sure to take a look here for an overview of the PRR's TrucTrain service and when these cars were built and run. And whatever you do, have fun with this little project!















-Steven Goehring
Model Railroad News Associate Editor