Bowser 43494 HO Scale Western Maryland 70-Ton 14-Panel 3-Bay Hopper #80358

Bowser HO scale 70-ton 14-panel three-bay open hopper lettered for the Western Maryland as #80358, in box car red with the road's slanted Speed Lettering. Ready to run.

• Ready to run with crisp details and sharp painting and printing
• Free-rolling trucks with metal wheels
• Magnetic knuckle couplers
• Box car red body with black underframe and trucks
• Speed Lettering - the WM's forward-leaning lettering with speed stripes, first applied 3 March 1952
• Bowser sells separate coal loads that drop straight into the car
• Stablemates in the same run: 43492 WM #80300 and 43493 WM #80344

The 14-panel three-bay 70-ton hopper design originated with the New York Central, which took about 7,000 cars from 1956 into the early 1960s; Bethlehem Steel built 500 of them for the Western Maryland in spring 1958. The WM cars rode on roller-bearing trucks and wore a yellow circled R to alert crews. Take care with the distributor's short description, which names only the railroad - this is an open coal hopper, not a caboose, despite sitting near Bowser's N8 cabin cars in the item-number block. Bowser publishes no barcode and no photography for this road number, so imagery shows the same scheme on a sister car. Country of manufacture and weight are our estimates.