New Product Express August 3rd, 2021
Excitement is "building" this week, as Walthers New Product Express rolls in with carloads of lumber, and construction crews!
Chances are the wood supporting your layout was actually delivered by train! From logs to lumber, railroads have long played a part in moving building materials, traditionally inside boxcars or on flatcars. While flats allowed for fast loading and unloading, the cargo could easily shift in transit, was exposed to weather and was an easy target for theft. Boxcars kept things dry and secure, but took a lot of time and hard work to get them loaded and unloaded. Two new ideas appeared in the 1980s, wrapped lumber loads designed to be handled by forklifts, and a new generation of bulkhead flatcar equipped with a center beam to carry them. On early cars, the center portion of the center beam panels had oval-shaped cut-outs to reduce weight; these openings resembled a Victorian-era window, and cars built this way came to be known as "opera window cars." Later designs replaced the panels with a lightweight series of steel trusses, which remain the standard for current production cars. WalthersMainline® makes them easy to model in HO with a new run due in September, that includes both body styles, and SceneMaster™ Wrapped Lumber Load kits are available to add the finishing touch.
Two new SceneMaster figure sets are also on track for a fall delivery and will add a lot of life to any HO scene! First up is the Yard Crew set, perfect for 1960s-1970s era layouts, and a hard-working crew of Construction Workers. Both sets include six layout-ready figures, molded inrealistic poses and finished in realistic colors.
