Freight Car Friday #36 – LRIX Pulpwood Flatcars

Also in captive service on the Huron Central is this fleet of leased cars owned by Lake Superior Eastern Rail Industries, with LRIX reporting marks. Like Huron Central’s own cars with HCRY reporting marks, these cars in are dedicated captive service between the pulpwood loading spur at the HCRY Sault Ste. Marie yard and the pulp mill at Espanola, Ontario, approximately 60 km west of Sudbury.

The LRIX fleet was acquired in 2008, and consists of three groups of cars.

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LRIX 2700-2708. These cars have a 70′ long loading space inside the bulkheads, and were formerly QGRY 2700-2708. (Before that, ?) The stencilled data on the cars indicate they were originally built in 1975.

LRIX 2709 may be a different type of car not pictured. QGRY 2709 was listed as a 60′ inside length car.

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LRIX 2710-2719. These cars are just over 60′ long inside the bulkheads, and their lineage is unknown.

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LRIX 2720-2729. These 60’10’ inside length cars were originally built by Hawker-Siddeley in 1970 as part of the CP 304800-304879 series. The Walthers pulpwood flatcar is actually a dead ringer for these cars, as it was actually based on this original CP series.

Net Storage Boxes

These storage boxes are a simple detail, but due to their position right at the top centre of the door (yep, the box is actually mounted right on the door itself) makes for a prominent feature on the A end of the car.

These boxes were used to stow mesh netting, which would be used to cover a load of woodchips to (try to) prevent the contents from blowing out of the car while in transit.

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The boxes of course are straightforward simple construction, with a front cut from .020″ sheet and sides and bottoms cut from pieces of .020x.100″ strip. Of course the one wrinkle is that the box does come over the top frame of the door, so the top corners have to be carefully notched .040x.040″ to clear the frame but not leave any visible gap when finished.

The lids (installed after the assembled boxes were cemented to the end assembly) are pieces of .010x.080″ strip.

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Here’s one of the partly completed ends with the storage box installed.

Apart from grab iron and ladder details, my stack of parts is really starting to look like something now.

AC Woodchip Car Progress and Doors

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Over the could of weeks I’ve been continuing to make some progress on my scratchbuilt Algoma Central woodchip gondolas. I’ve completed some more sides so that I have enough for three cars currently and I’ve also been getting some work done on the door ends of the cars.

These took some careful laying out, but other than that have been going together fairly well. Like the other parts of the car so far, this mainly consists of a .020″ sheet forming the backing of the main door with .040″ square styrene strip for the vertical ribs on the door. The corner posts are .060″ square and the top beam is .080″. These parts of the frame are glued to the edges of the .020″ door sheet, not using the surface backing.

The trickiest part actually turned out to be cutting the angles on the bottom sheet representing the reinforced end sill on theses cars (since the majority of the end isn’t structural, but a top-hinged door that can open up like a dump truck). I had to throw out a few attempts that weren’t quite symmetrical.

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The hinge detail was also a little tricky to manipulate due to the extreme small size of the pieces, but otherwise the design is pretty straightforward.

The vertical parts of the hinges attached to the door are .010x.040″ strip while the hinge mounts were carefully cut out of bits of .010x.080″ strip.

There’s still some additional detail to add (ladders, grab irons, latches and a storage box attached to the door for mesh nets used to contain loads and prevent chips from blowing away in transit), but otherwise I have all the major pieces now to complete three bodies except for the next major project: the underframe/floor.

Freight Car Friday #35 – HCRY Pulpwood Flatcars

For this next series in Freight Car Friday, we’re going to head over to the Huron Central side of Sault Ste. Marie.

Huron Central has a small 30 car fleet of their own pulpwood cars, all 52′ (nominal) inside length cars with side stakes in several variations, from various former Canadian National and Duluth, Winnipeg & Pacific (a CN subsidiary) lineages. These cars are in captive service between the Huron Central yard in Sault Ste. Marie, where they are loaded, and the pulp mill in Espanola, ON, so these would never or rarely leave HCRY rails. However, this captive nature of the fleet makes for an interesting treat for the avid freight car enthusiast when visiting the area, and if one were interested in modelling the Huron Central, these would be an important key to representing the correct equipment and traffic.

Here’s a few of HCRY’s hodge-podge of ex-CN flatcars, shot in two separate visits in summer 2013 and 2014.

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HCRY 70002, ex-CN 604651, ex-DWC 606350-606849 or 607900-608999 series?

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HCRY 70005, ex-CN 613051

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HCRY 70007, ex-DWC 605103

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HCRY 70008, ex-DWC 606386

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HCRY 70013, ex-DWC 606716

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HCRY 70014, ex-DWC 606743

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HCRY 70016, ex-DWC 608549

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HCRY 70019, ex-DWC 608887

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HCRY 70027, ex-CN 604068, ex-CN 608000-608349 series