Today I received the last needed decals for the excess height markings for this car in the mail and finished off the last little details on this car. Just in time to deliver it to this weekend’s operating session at the model train club.
This was kitbashed from an Intermountain 40′ boxcar, with the body cut and spliced to extend the height. One of the greatest advantages of the Intermountain kit for this job is that the roof, ends, body and doors are all separate pieces, and the ends, doors and roof on the prototype car all have their splices and extra material in different spots.
The lettering and various markings was cobbled together from a mix of Microscale, Highball Graphics and CDS sets. Photos of prototype cars show quite a variety in the exact positioning of different pieces of the lettering, no two seems quite the same.
This model is based on prototype photos of about 4 different cars in the CP 41000-41029 series (the above example courtesy Jurgen Kleylein), which was rebuilt in 1980, but I numbered it after a car in the small 3-car series 48550-48552 which existed in the mid 1970s and has the same reported dimensions and features. Unfortunately, I’ve not found any photos of any of these cars, so I’ve exercised a little modeller’s license and an educated guess that their appearance would be the same or at least similar.
The extra-tall squished multimark was custom masked and painted to fit.
Hi Chris,
Yes, I’m aware that you wrote this article several years ago, but I just came across a photo of a 48000 car on Fallen Flags (CP Freight Cars) that you may want to look at. I’ve seen some of the 41000 cars in Toronto back in the day – they looked very impressive beside “normal” height cars!
Regards
Paul Smith
Thanks Paul, I looked and found it. Must have been posted more recently in the years since. Bit of a different conversion with the splice closer to the top and the door treatment is kinda neat.
http://rr-fallenflags.org/cp/cp048550n03.jpg
CP had a lot of very interesting kit-bashed cars.
Hello again, Chris,
I’ve been looking at that photo of the 48550 some more. I’ll have to wait until I can print a copy and hopefully magnify the image, but it appears the 48000 roof panels are flat rectangular style rather than the diagonal panels for the 41000 cars. Any thoughts?
I’ve had a hankering to try building one or more of these cars on and off over the years. Thanks for posting your model and info. I plan to try doing one of each class in HO. I mentioned this to an N scaler in my local club – he may have a go at an N version (or, more likely, talk me into building it for him!).
Paul Smith
It looks like this car has been rebuilt from an original NSC product. That’s an NSC bow-tie panel roof (very similar to a Pullman-Standard roof) and while the ends aren’t real visible, they’re probably NSC ends of the type known as “NSC-3” by freight car historians and modelers.
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=cp56065&o=cprail
Parts source for ends:
http://www.yarmouthmodelworks.com/index.php/ModelDetailParts/FreightCarParts#ends