
I've recently come to appreciate the early wood and cardstock kits, they capture a nice nostalgia for me which being born in 1980 I never lived through. I enjoy imagining how excited a kid or adult modeler would have been in the 1940s to open such a simple kit and see the printed sides and couple details and know that hand lettering wouldn't be necessary and that trucks didn't need to be scratchbuilt. With those early "kits", any sort of truck was exciting, even crude ones. The only other detail parts might be a couple ladders and rough brake wheel which required a lot of filing to clean up.
I have a couple cars which are just a woodblock with a milled roof and cardstock sides which I will run at Christmas as a nostalgic old time train.
I just finished a Binkley East Broad Top Boxcar which had some more detail parts than the swift kits; it too was satisfying to build at a higher standard and involved some careful paint blending and overspraying to blend the original silk screened car sides. Matching the sides and ends is the most difficult part of these models, but is really helpful in boosting realism. I only updated the sliding boxcar door castings, but used the original kit trucks, car ends, ladders and brakewheel. All were cast in a soft lead alloy and required loads of careful filing to get them free of loads of flash; but my labors were rewarded with fairly realistic detail parts.

Blair
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