Kitbashing a Bangor & Aroostook caboose

I like fun modeling projects, and when I switched to O scale a couple of years ago I thought it might be nice to have my first real "kitbash" project be a Bangor & Aroostook Railroad caboose. In real like, the BAR purchased a bunch of old troop sleeper cars after WWII for a good price and then converted them to cabooses. They were not well liked by crews because the rode poorly. The BAR had at least 16 of them on their roster, and it seems that no two were alike. There are still a few existing today, including caboose C-87 at the Frenchville Historical Society. I based my model on that caboose.

Here is the finished model:

I started with a decorated Atlas a 2-rail model, which meant I not only had to modify the body but I also had to switch out the trucks for 3-rail items. And finding those replacement trucks was the hardest part of the project.

The project involved a lot of cutting, filing, modifying, sanding, and fabricating. But, I knew going in that it would and I had a real blast doing the work. I picked this project because I like working in styrene and realized that for an O scale caboose everything would be large enough to easily see and work on.

I wrote an article about its construction for a magazine and it might be published in the future, so I won't want to get into its construction here on the blog. But, it proved to be a really fun project. The toughest part was sourcing 3-rail trucks as Atlas was out of stock for several years. But, they recently announced a new run of these cars which hopefully means that spare trucks will be available.