Athearn Wide Vision Caboose
Athearn
Wide Vision Caboose...
Athearn makes a good wide vision caboose for you to do
a Chessie C&O Caboose. For the money, there isn't anything better
on the market. You should pay between $5 and $6 for one. I
have found a few undecorated ones for $3 or $4. Compare that price
to the $12-$15 for an Atlas caboose.
There are some discrepencies between the Chessie prototype
and this kit. Most are very minor and don't require you to correct
unless you want to. Below are pics of each side of a real wide vision
caboose.
Below is one of my Athearn Wide Vision cabeese. Notice it does
not come with the end railings. You will need to make these if you
want to be accurate. I will mass produce mine soon and add them to
this caboose later. Also notice that there is a small third window
on each side of the real caboose that is not on the Athearn kit.
You can cut one out of another kit and put it in if you want to, but this
is a really minor flaw. The roof ends need to be capped.
The Athearn kit didn't come with the yellow part with the red diagonal
stripes you see below, this part needs to be added. The bottom of
the cabin isn't perfectly straight on the real thing (see light grey parts
on 903287 above), the Athearn kit is missing these parts, but this is also
a minor difference.
All and all this is a very good kit. I would say it is 90%
accurate. They come undecorated, in Chessie safety schemes, predecessor
C&O blue, and standard Chessie yellow. I prefer to paint my own
but these prepainted ones are a good choice too.
