AC 238156 is one of 96 “new” pulpwood cars that were acquired by Wisconsin Central in late 1995 for service on the Algoma Central Railway. These 66′ inside length bulkhead flatcars were acquired second-hand from CP Rail and rebuilt with side stakes for pulpwood.
This car was photographed in Cochrane, Ontario on July 16, 2013 heading empty back to Hearst with several other AC and WC marked pulpwood flatcars for interchange back to CN.
I’ve had the opportunity to put a little more work into my section house build, and it’s starting to get a lot closer to finished.
Across the front of the structure is a covered porch which extends the full width of the building. According to the standard drawings, the porch extends five and a half feet forward from the structure. To start the porch roof, I built an open framework using scale 4×4 strip for the porch roof. This was a very delicate piece to work with, but holds together fairly strongly once fully assembled with the sheet material for the roof’s surface cemented to the rafters.
After this was all set up, I proceeded to add the fascia trim to all of the roof edges of the structure.
I also built the porch with a sheet of .020″ thick scribed Evergreen styrene sheet material and some .060x.060″ strip framing. Then, to complete the model down to the ground and also hold everything together more rigidly, I added the vertical board cladding all around the bottom supports of the structure. (Some more recent photos at this location show some of this replaced with lattice, but I have a couple of older photos that I’ve saved and archived in my reference folder where this is vertical siding all the way around, so I went with this approach.)
You’ll also notice I’ve added the chimneys for the stoves that heat the structure. To mount the main chimney at the peak of the roof, I filed a notch into the roof itself so that the chimney could be cemented down on a flat surface rather than trying some sort of painful attempt to cut a peaked bevel into the base of the molded plastic chimney which I never would have pulled off cleanly.
The kitchen chimney however had the based filed off at an angle to bevel it to the slope of the roof.
Earlier this weekend, John Longhurst published a post over on his M&M Sub Blog about some early scratchbuilt structures on his layout, including his first ever scratchbuild, a small industrial building, although he states how the structure has no place on his current layout, partly because it doesn’t fit, and partly because like many first efforts it no longer holds up to his current standards.
John posted a link to the same post and started a discussion over on the Trains/Model Railroader forums inviting others to share examples of their first scratchbuilt structure efforts.
Here’s mine.
I built this small building out of cereal box cardboard when I was still in grade school, cutting strips of boxboard glued to a core of the same to simulate clapboard siding. The tarpaper/roll roofing is regular masking tape.
I’ll never actually use this building on a layout again, as everything about it is of course well below any current standard I would set for myself, but I keep it around out of some sort of sentimental value as my first building that I made myself.
This old QGRY (Quebec-Gatineau Railway) boxcar was originally built in 1964 by Hawker-Siddeley for Canadian Pacific and amazingly enough in 2004 still carries its original as-delivered paint job, when the majority of these cars were repainted CP Rail throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Photographed in the former ACR Steelton yard in August 2004, this car was probably loaded with pulp or paper from the pulp mill at Espanola on the Huron Central Railway (Huron Central and Quebec Gatineau are both subsidiaries of Genesee Rail One Canada), interchanged to CN to travel to destinations in the midwest United States.