The author recently purchased a Hooker Chemical 3 bay hopper at an estate sale to complement his sizable collection of Hooker tank cars. The problem was it was missing one truck but that should be easy to fix, right? Wrong! This older car used the plastic pin to hold the truck to the body. This was the way Atlas did rolling stock in the past.
Not having a parts diagram (estate sale, remember?) that was the first thing needed. The first place to look was HOSeeker.net under Atlas. This is a locomotive heavy site so no luck there. Next was the Atlas parts diagram site. There was a center flow hopper listed there but it was a newer type that used screws for the trucks.
Last chance, the specific hopper was located on the Atlas archive site under 3 and 6 bay cylindrical hoppers. Searching here the author found the specific car with road number 32035. Again no luck with a diagram but the car was in the August 2006 run. This was a big help!
So left with no other option Atlas Parts was called. After describing what was needed and the date of the car run to the person on the other end. He said "That's an old car. We have some parts...let me look." No joy!! Rather than saying "sorry, see ya" however, he transferred me to the parts manager. He said they did not have parts for that old a car BUT, he did have a part that may work as a replacement. He mailed 2 of the pins to the author and THEY WORKED! I called him back and told them they worked and I would like to order more of them as spares. I was able to buy 12 of the pins for $1.75. See Fig 1. Such a deal!
If you have an idea for a blog post here, let me know. If I can comment on it, I will or I'll see if someone else can and post it.
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