Excerpted from a recent email to George Irwin
<snip>
***
Also some background info on the Roco
cars. In addition to the N cars, Roco tooled
some of the same cars in HO scale (the helium
car comes to mind) for AHM.
So the choice of which cars to make, some of
which, as you note at a1g, led to some models
based on pretty esoteric prototypes.
I don't know if there is a direct connection, but
ConCor's European rep, Nick Pfusterschmid,
who got the Roco N stuff back for ConCor a few
years ago, also worked for AHM on their HO
product line in the late 1960's.
One reason these cars do not surface very often
is that the N cars are tooled in groups of 4. So if a
US company wants one car, they usually take all 4
to save on set up and production charges. But
that can mean taking a "dog" or two to get the car(s)
you want.
A good example of this was the "longitudinal hopper"
run by ConCor in the mid 90's) (not done for Atlas but
done for Model Power)
This car was in the 4-car group along with the 86 ft
high cube boxcar that we really wanted. But we had
to take the hopper car in order to get the boxcar (Atlas
a1g 3130 series).
The mold is set up in a + shape with the plastic
entering the mold in the center and flowing out to the
4 individual cavities at the 4 points of the "cross".
If I still worked at ConCor I could ask to look up the Roco
files and tell you how the cars are grouped. I don't
think ConCor would otherwise release that info.
eNjoy your weekend
Don Brown
Tucson AZ
