Is This Narrow Gauge?

 

Try your best to ignore the messy paint work and focus on the trucks.

Recently I began raiding my collection of rolling stock in order to see if I had any passenger trucks I could use for the Binkley combine and coach I've been rebuilding for the Morning Milk & Mail train.  But, I hear you say, I thought you already had trucks for these cars?  Yes, and no.  I had planned to use Selley trucks re-built with metal wheels but this is tricky work to unsolder them without damage.  The one set of Binkley trucks I have I had planned to use under the Binkley/Red Ball Fruit Car, and these have the beginnings of zinc rot showing.  Hence, the "robbing Peter to pay Paul" effort, hunting for trucks.

But that's not what this post is about.  My search led me to the Ulrich "Sierra" cars I had stashed away.  Back in 2001, when I was living with my wife in her parents' home with only an occasional kitchen table to use for modeling, I embarked on building these beautiful kits.  I nearly completed one car before we were able to move.  At that point life got busier, my modeling interests shifted and the cars were packed away until a few years later when I began painting one and building an interior for it.

That's as far as it got before we moved again (and again), and yet again more projects came and went.  That brings the story up to today.  See, I had always wondered if these Ulrich cars were too small for HO standard gauge.  The trucks somehow seemed too big, but I didn't have any point of reference other than photos of models  These cars aren't an exact match for the Sierra cars so often seen in Westerns and other TV shows, but they're close.  Still, they seemed too small.

A while back I stumbled on an orphaned HOn3 combine on eBay that I couldn't live without.  On close examination it seems to be a scratchbuilt car using styrene.  Really fine work, though the styrene has warped with age.  I think the trucks are Kemtron but I can't be sure.  So when I pulled out the Ulrich cars to look at their trucks I decided to do a little experiment.  Carefully removing the trucks from the scratchbuilt car, I set the Ulrich car onto them.  Bingo.  Now it looks right (see the photo at the head of this article).  That means I can now use the Ulrich trucks for the Binkley cars and once again pack away the Ulrich cars for the day I find some HOn3 trucks on which they can ride.

See for yourself the size similarity - the brown combine is the scratchbuild, the brightly colored coach is the Ulrich car.  Length isn't as indicative as width in determining an appropriate size for standard or narrow gauge.  In fact, the Florida Railway bought narrow gauge passenger equipment and set it on standard gauge trucks.  That looked as strange as the Ulrich cars on their standard gauge trucks, at least to my eye because the carbodies were too narrow for the trucks.  Other railroads took small standard gauge cars and placed the on narrow gauge trucks.  Again, this looks odd, but hey, there's a prototype for everything, if you look long enough.