Category Archives: Freight Cars

Freight Car Friday #1 – AC 433

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To keep this blog a little more active and interesting, and to share a bit of the collection, I’m going to try this new feature. On a semi-regular basis, I’ll schedule these posts for Friday mornings.

“Freight Car Friday” posts will normally consist one or two related photos of an Algoma Central freight car, or some other freight car subject related to the AC. This might be a prototype shot or a model shot. It might be an AC car, or a non-AC car photographed on the AC, or otherwise related in some context. It might be a revenue service or non-revenue car. It may or may not include a lot of commentary with the photo.

So check back in here on Fridays for a regular dose of freight cars. I should have enough material to keep this going for quite a while.

I’ll lead off the series with this photo of AC 433 at Steelton yard, taken on July 28, 2014 from the Agawa Canyon Tour Train on my summer railfanning vacation to northern Ontario.

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The 400 series number on this car was assigned by Wisconsin Central in the late 1990s. The lettering style marks this as originally from somewhere in the AC 601-875 series of 52’6″ gondolas built by National Steel Car in two separate batches in 1959 and 1961. Notice though the additional little angle iron brackets along the top edge of the car side in several places; these appear to be attachment points for clamping down covers for protecting coil steel loads, indicating that prior to its renumbering to the 400 series by WC for work service, this was either a 925-934 or 975-984 series coil steel service car (these two groups were drawn from former 601-875 series cars; another group of 25 cars numbered 900-924 was acquired new in 1961 for coil steel service). When in coil steel service, they would have colourful bright yellow painted 3 piece steel covers to protect the load. It’s now one of five AC gondolas on hand at Steelton yard loaded with track panel sections and track materials for effecting quick repairs to a section of track.

CP 48551 Completed

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The extra-tall squished multimark was custom masked and painted to fit.

Scratchbuilt Ends for 2301-2373 Series Flatcar – Part 1

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Over the long weekend and this week I’ve had the opportunity to get back into some of my modeling. One project that I’ve re-started up is starting to fabricate the scratchbuilt end racks for a few 2300 series 40′ flatcars. I started this a long time ago, building a rough test end on an old scrap Athearn flatcar, and then managed to complete the basic outline of one (actual) end before the project wandered off onto a back burner.

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Test build on a scrap Athearn flatcar from the junk pile.

The test build was done to accurate dimensions overall to test the measurements, overall look and robustness of the build, although the interior framing within the end is not to scale, just thrown in for effect and to strengthen the assembly. The simple square of butt-joined styrene strip is extremely fragile, but once assembled into a whole piece with the inner bracing and the wide walls, the whole thing is actually remarkably rigid.

The test build appearing to be rather successful, it was on to start fabricating real parts, with precision cut pieces and all the inner parts located properly.

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End view of AC 2358 at Frater in 1996. Blair Smith photo.

I’m lucky to have a couple of nice dead-on end shots saved in my reference files to help scale out the ends. The dimensions listed in the equipment register give the interior height of the car (from the top of the deck boards to the top of the bulkhead) as 9’0″, and an interior width of 9’7″. Scaling from the photos, the width over the outside of the two inner square posts appears to be close to or just under 4′ across, and centred. The horizontal member is a little bit above evenly half way up the end.

The deck boards on the Athearn flat however are 9’0″ across, so fashioning the ends to add to this model to kitbash one of the ACR cars will leave the width slightly narrow, and the end rack a little bit more square than prototype. (I also measured across a Tichy kit and its width is also 9’0″.) It’s not overly noticeable, though a 6″ loss over 9’6″ is about a 5.3% difference.

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One partially completed end frame, and parts for a second showing rough assembly sequence.

My outer frame is made from .030x.040″ strip for the bottom and outer side posts (as the side posts will be laminated to the thickness of the sheet used for the side of the car), and .040x.040″ for the rest of the major structural members (top and middle horizontal, and inner vertical posts). Representing the Z-shaped bar stock between the two inner square posts will be an interesting challenge yet…

To ease in the measuring and cutting, I made the top and bottom horizontal members full width, so the side and inner vertical posts are all cut to the same length and cemented between the top pieces. Then the middle horizontal pieces will be cut to fit between the spaces.

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Parts and sub-assemblies for four pairs of ends.

For assembly, I glued together the outer frame first with a liquid styrene cement, using some small precision squares to keep everything aligned and square. Then the inner part of the end bracing is assembled as a unit that can be inserted into the outer frame by cutting the bottom plate from .030x.040″ strip to fit between the two posts, and the same for the horizontal part.

Once the inner frame assemblies are inserted into the outer frame and cemented together, then I’ll cut and insert the other bits of the horizontal member to finish up the basic assembly of the end frame. Then I just need to do something about the Z verticals to finish the end bracing, and move on to the sides and mounting these onto a car body.

AC 2301-2373 40′ Pulpwood Flatcars

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The Algoma Central rostered several distinctive designs of freight cars that didn’t exactly match anything on other railroads. One of these signature cars was a 73 car series of 40’ flatcars with a 9’ tall open framework with wraparound sides at each end of the car. These permanent end racks created a fleet of cars that could be used for pulpwood service on the ACR, delivering pulpwood from spurs and sidings along the line to the Abitibi Paper mill in Sault Ste. Marie.

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AC 2358 at Frater in September 1996, loaded with fresh ties and MOW supplies. Blair Smith photo.

Pulpwood was cut in 8’ lengths and loaded widthwise in the cars, with the end racks containing the pile, and the friction of the logs’ rough surfaces holding everything else together. These cars were used extensively and primarily for this, but I’ve also seen a photo of a trio of these cars in the late 1970s loaded with wrapped lumber loads from the Newaygo Forest Products sawmill at Mead (1974-1985), and they could be used for any sort of company service load requiring an open flat car as well (being particularly well suited to loading with new ties in the same manner as pulpwood logs).

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Train of pulpwood arriving at Steelton yard, early 1990s. Morgan Turney photo via James Brookman.

The exact history of these cars is unknown, but they show up on Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) listings in two batches beginning in 1965-66. It’s likely that they are drawn from other series of 40’ flatcars with the custom end racks fabricated by the ACR’s car shops. By the early 1970s these cars no longer appear in the ORER listings, but these did remain actively in service well into the late 1980s and early 1990s (just not in interchange service and thus no longer included in the published data supplied to the ORER – a 1984 ACR freight listing reproduced in Dale Wilson’s “The Algoma Central Railway Story” indicates 69 of the 73 cars still in service), and a few examples still kicked around in company service well beyond the Wisconsin Central takeover. If any were left by the CN takeover of WC in late fall of 2001, this old equipment was likely scrapped then.

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AC 2363 with trash dumpsters in the Canyon house track in 2000. Chris vanderHeide photo.

While other railways had various types of flatcars for pulpwood service with end racks or bulkheads and sometimes V-shaped decks or deck risers or dividers for loading pulpwood in 4’ long logs in two rows, the square, open framing with wraparound sides of these ACR cars makes for a distinctive looking car, particularly with the ACR bear herald emblazoned on the left hand side. Athearn even had an ancient old HO scale model from their old “Blue-Box” line of a 40’ pulpwood flatcar with superficially similar end racks, but the corners are rounded and the car has fishbelly sides and a prominent ridge in the centre of the deck. This could be used as a rough stand-in, but the divider/ridge in the middle is problematic, and the flooring of the car would have to be extensively reworked.

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End view of AC 2358 at Frater, September 1996. Blair Smith photo.

To really get proper looking racks, they’d have to be scratchbuilt, either on an existing model of a 40’ flatcar with straight side sills, or a fully scratchbuilt model.

CP 31236

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Taking advantage of the long weekend at home to work on a few projects on the bench.

First up is completing some basic weathering on this Canadian Pacific woodchip boxcar:

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This car was built from an Intermountain 40′ PS-1 boxcar kit, with scratchbuilt chip doors, custom painted and lettered mostly with CDS transfers, with some Microscale sets to fill in some of the detail lettering and the U-1 inspection dot. Weathering was done with artist’s pan pastels.

This car will probably wind up in service over at the club layout; woodchips were shipped from Dubreuilville on the ACR to Terrace Bay on the Canadian Pacific using cars supplied by CP, but the best information I have suggests that this particular service was mainly in 52′-60′ gondolas, not boxcars, and it’ll be a few years yet before I have anything running, so this can join another 5 or 6 similar cars in a chip service pool on the club layout.