A Survey of HO Hoppers |
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| I began this article with the intention of acquiring one each of every HO scale covered hopper I could find and converting each of them to an open hopper. I never quite got the project underway, and ended up selling most of the hoppers without every taking them apart. What is left are the actual cars that I modeled and a couple I sold. | |
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| The AHM 4-bay hopper. This model has a unique look and is the only model I've seen of a
hopper like this. The roof is removable and the trucks have couplers mounted on them, and unfortunately, attach by clips on the trucks instead of a screw. |
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| I chopped up the hopper and used one of the bays for the static charger on back of engine #511. On the right, I began building a unique tender, but I sold the engine I was going to use and put the project on hold. |
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| Here are two Athearn models, a cylindrical hopper and a ribside hopper. Both have the roof and sides as one piece and a separate underframe/floor/chassis. | |
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This Concor single bay covered hopper, undecorated kit, has the underframe separate from the rest of the body. The hopper bottom and ends are one unit. The body and the roof are one piece and there are three bulkheads inside the body to give it strength. |
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| Here is my kitbash of this hopper. Brass sheet was cut and placed between the ribs. Two sections of the roof were removed and filled in with styrene sheet. The bottom bay was boxed in. | |
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Atlas Trainman covered hopper. The roof is removable and the underframe and sides are one piece. I kitbashed this into an open hopper see Sitemap page "Kitbashing an Atlas Hopper." |
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| Here is my kitbash of the this hopper. | |
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| Left: an MDC/Roundhouse ribside covered hopper. Right upper: McKean cylindrical hopper kit. Left lower: comparison of the topside of each body. Note the McKean has a separate roof from the body and the MDC has the roof and sides molded together. Right Lower: comparison of bottoms. McKean has a molded in bottom while the MDC 's bottom is a separate assembly. | |
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| The length was chopped. | |
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| The Intermountain cylindrical hopper has both a separate floor and roof. | |
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| Tyco made two styles of covered hopper, a 4 bay cylindrical model (shown) and a 3 bay ribside model. Most of the paint schemes were bright and a lot of gloss paint was used. This made the lettering last but it wasn't always realistic looking. They used the horn hook coupler mounted to the truck by stubs on the truck. The hole in the body is large and makes it difficult to mount a better type truck with a screw. Left: Tyco. Right: Atlas. | |
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| Left: an open hopper I made from this car. Right: a heavy metals car I made from two of the other style Tyco covered hopper. | |
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| Left: comparison of MDC and Concor ribside hopper bodies. Right: comparison of Athearn cylindrical hopper and InerMountain cylindrical hopper bodies. Note that the InterMountain body is almost round, has almost vertical ends without the sloping hopper overhanging the ends. | |