The first thing you notice about the Husky Stack is that this is not your grandfather's N-scale model freight car. For one, the detailing is very intricate and accurate. Many separately built detail parts adorn the car. For two, the car has body-mounted McHenry couplers. Finally, the model rides very low and close to the rails, noticeably closer than previous N-scale double-stack cars. The car measures out incredibly close to published measured drawings. In fact, I found every published measurement to be within inches of spot-on. There was no published value for overall coupled length, although it's safe to assume that the over-scale coupler shank common to all N-scale couplers would skew this measurement. Still, it was a joy to run down my scale converter and input value after value from the caliper... and smile as each one lined up. Kudos to Athearn and their predecessors for the attention to detail. Speaking of detail, the car is nicely done. Both freestanding and molded-on brake equipment and air lines follow the published drawings and available photographs. The walkways look very nice, but they are not as accurate. The drawing published in DeBoer's Piggyback and Containers shows the car having full walkways on both sides of each end. This means the Athearn car would be lacking a step on each side (when looking at the car from the end, each side is lacking a step on the left). This may have been omitted to leave room for the brake rigging on the B end of the car. I won't miss this specific detail, although it bears printing here, considering the high praise I give these cars on scale accuracy.
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