Athearn announces HO Evans double plug door boxcar for varied eras

Athearn added an HO 50-foot Evans double plug door boxcar to its May 11 release wave, and the car’s real strength is flexibility. Built around a prototype from Evans Products, formerly U.S. Railway Equipment, the 70-ton boxcar worked from the 1960s through the 1980s hauling large, light freight such as lumber, paper products, and canned goods. Athearn places the model in a 1960s-to-2000s era window, which makes it useful well beyond a single decade.

That long service life is what gives this car so much practical value on a layout. The double plug door arrangement opened up a wider loading space for palletized freight and oversized pieces while keeping the interior flush and better sealed than a typical boxcar. In railroad terms, that points to traffic that looks believable in more than one setting: lumber mills, paper plants, food shippers, warehouse districts, and industrial spurs where high-value or weather-sensitive loads moved in and out of boxcars rather than general merchandise service. Athearn also notes that Evans freight cars from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were still plentiful in the 1990s, and many remained in service after that, which gives the model a strong bridge between transitional-era operations and later freight consists.

The model itself is built for operators as much as collectors. Athearn’s release includes a double 8-foot plug door, an injection-molded body, separately applied end ladders and brake wheel, fully assembled ready-to-run construction, weighted operation, body-mounted McHenry couplers, machined metal wheels with RP25 contours, and an 18-inch minimum radius. Those details matter on layouts where cars need to track cleanly through tighter curves while still standing up visually in a mixed freight.

Horizon Hobby lists the HO ATH 50' Evans Double Plug Door Box Car at $39.99, and Athearn’s 2026 listings show the tooling in Union Pacific, CNW, FWD, and USLX paint schemes. That combination makes the car especially useful for modelers building compact industries, 1970s freight pools, or later-era branch lines that still need credible older boxcars in the mix. The Evans double plug door car is the kind of release that quietly broadens a roster, because it works as a lumber car, a paper car, a canned-goods car, or a durable holdover in late freight service without looking out of place.