Knowing this was somewhat of rare find, I of course snapped it up.Īs an active S-gauger, my immediate thought was to create an S-gauge model of this #33509 HO scale railcar: sort of reverse modeling of the Gilbert line, while adding a new railcar to my S-gauge fleet with an authentic “prototype”. I located a RISS truck trailer at a recent flee market, being the only Gilbert product in the box of other toy and model trains. The trailer’s road name was also new to the Gilbert line, printed on the same trailer chassis used for the S-gauge line, always being much closer to HO scale than S scale. One was the #33509 Western Maryland piggyback flatcar equipped with a single RISS truck trailer. Was it the thought of S-gaugers converting to HO scale would want the same road names in the smaller version? Or was it simply easier and cheaper for Gilbert to reproduce these road names in HO scale?Ī few HO scale cars however were manufactured with road names never offered in S-gauge. One must wonder what was the reasoning for the duplication. As Gilbert developed their HO scale line of model trains, many of the long-established S-gauge railroad road names were duplicated in their HO scale offerings.