A trio of Boxcars in the Paint Shop

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Chris van der Heide

This evening I sat down at the spray booth and painted these three cars boxcar brown:

The three cars are the CP woodchip car from my previous post, and another pair of 40′ boxcars that will also be lettered for Canadian Pacific.

This at least moves these three cars one step closer to completion. It’ll be nice to start getting some of these projects that have been kicking around on the back burner for so long actually finished up and off the workbench when I have so many other projects either in progress or wanting to be done. 🙂

CP Woodchip Boxcar – 6′ Chip Doors

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Chris van der Heide

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Canadian Pacific converted several hundred old 40′ boxcars into woodchip gondolas via the simple expedient of cutting away the roofs of the cars. While there were some variations (including some older International of Maine conversions that had the height of the sides extended and doors widened to 8′) the standard conversion in the 1980s was a simple 40′ boxcar with standard 6′ door with the roof cut away and the original sliding doors replaced with a two-piece hinged wooden door.

Source cars for these conversions were drawn from various different original series, and there’s a lot of variation in these converted cars.

The mill at Dubreuilville shipped out large amounts of woodchips in cars supplied by Canadian Pacific to pulp mills along the Lake Superior north shore at Marathon or Terrace Bay. So I can use a collection of CP woodchip service cars for this traffic. The ACR would have handled these cars just the short distance between Dubreuilville and Franz. Extra empties were apparently typically stored in the siding at Wanda, between Dubreuilville and Franz.

This car is a Intermountain kit for a Pullman-Standard “PS-1” 40′ boxcar. (“PS-1” was actually Pullman-Standard’s catalog designation for ANY boxcar they produced, although model railroaders have (somewhat erroneously) come to associate the term with just Pullman-Standard’s earlier post-war designs.) The body details are assembled pretty much as according to the kit although the roof and doors are left out.

The main visual feature of the car (apart from the missing roof) is the new chip doors, which necessitated the scratchbuilding of said doors from styrene.

The new door is a piece of .020″ styrene sheet cut to fit the door opening, trimmed with .010″x.060″ strip for the edges of the door panel. The horizontal door locking bar and the “mounting pads” under the hinges are pieces of .010″x.040″ strip. The flat parts of the door hinges are represented by pieces of .005″ styrene, basically eyeballed and cut with a razor blade, and the actual hinge parts at the edge of the door, and the vertical locking bar at the top of the door are bits of thin brass wire.

The bottom hinge plate at the foot of the door is a piece of .015″x.156″ strip with a .020″x.020″ trim piece along the top.

Because the car is open, and thus has little or no way to hide any weight, I inserted a styrene false floor into the car which hides a thin layer of sheet lead flashing to give the car weight.

The roofs on most of these cars were removed simply by torching out the panels in between the roof ribs (carlines). Most of these cars kept these ribs in place to hold the car together, but over time these got banged up and damaged and cars would be missing many of them. I used T-section styrene shapes to make a representation of these remaining roof ribs, leaving several out as “missing”.

This pretty much completes the major details of this particular car; next step is painting.

Scratchbuilt Boxcar Tack Boards

Posted on March 2, 2014 by Chris van der Heide

I spent some time this nice Sunday afternoon trying to catch up on some minor projects that have been languishing in a state of near-completion, or nearly-ready-for-the-paint-shop.

One of these projects was a pair of 50′ boxcars from Intermountain’s 50′ PS-1 boxcar kit. The one thing I didn’t really like about this otherwise excellent kit was the tackboards for the doors. (For the uninitiated, these are wooden boards mounted on or near the doors and the ends of the cars to which hazardous materials placards, or unloading or routing instruction cards could be stapled.) These tackboards generally consist of several wooden boards in a metal frame, and are usually mounted on the door of the car (for sliding door cars) or sometimes just beside the door on plug door cars.

The Intermountain kit part for the tack board has a really wide gap between the boards, which just doesn’t look right to me, so this project has been waiting on the sidelines for me to make new ones. Well, today finally I did.

This is a simple project; the tackboards themselves are 3 strips of HO scale 2″x6″ styrene cemented side by side, with the frame represented by a piece of 2×3 at each end. The 2×3 is cemented to the main 2×6 pieces such that it stands on edge, to give a little relief to the frame.

Here’s my scratchbuilt tack boards (enough for 2 cars) compared to the original Intermountain kit parts:

I simply find the dividing lines on the Intermountain part way too coarse. Which is odd, because I was perfectly happy with the tack board parts on several Intermountain 40′ kits I have, and you’d expect them to be similar within the product line.

The smaller tack boards were similarly done, with the centre board made from a single piece of 2×6.

I also got a couple of 40′ boxcar kits just about ready for the paint shop, hopefully I’ll have a chance to do some spraying tomorrow evening.

AC 8201-8500 Series Hoppers – Part 4: Grab Irons

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Chris van der Heide

Over the last few weeks I’ve been slowly working on this hopper project again, drilling out the myriad holes for the car body grab irons. This project languished for a while as I didn’t have any #80 drill bits (darn things are so easy to break!) so I had to order a few, and I’ve just been pretty busy through the last couple of months with the December holiday season and other things. However a week or two after New Year’s I got my order of fresh drill bits, and I’m trying to deliberately spend a little time at least one or two nights a week on projects. Of course the primary project I’ve started to get back into is my 25 car batch of hoppers where each step of progress takes a bit of time due to the volume of cars being worked on at the same time. And drilling out that many small holes on 25 bodies and frames has taken a few weeks to complete. So that has accounted for my dearth of recent updates. However I am trying to get some momentum going again, and hopefully get some other smaller projects finished off as well.

So, without further ado, back to the hopper project! Over the years this model has moved between different product lines at Walthers: first their standard line, then “Gold Line” with metal wheels, then “Platinum Line” which have wire grab irons factory installed. (And I think with the latest release(s) the model has been shifted again into the “Proto” series (the old Proto 2000 line inherited from Life-Like), although I really don’t think this model belongs in that category.) Earlier releases before the models were upgraded to the “Platinum” line did not have grab irons installed. I’ve been collecting these cars for quite a while now (and grabbing cheaper pre-“Platinum” cars at shows and on eBay to build up the fleet) so I have a lot of both.

Body Grabs

A bit of comparison of prototype photos to the model reveals a couple of interesting minor details.

First, the prototype AC cars have an additional grab mounted off the top cap on the end (which of course the model does not have, and which I discussed in an earlier post).

Secondly, when comparing end photos of the first batch of cars (AC 8201-8400) to the second batch (AC 8401-8500), notice that the first series has one extra grab iron compared to the later series:

AC 8390 end view. At Steelton shops, August 1997. Blair Smith photo.

AC 8495 end details. March 1981. Photographer unknown, Chris vanderHeide collection.

Notice that the 8300 series car at top has a total of 5 end grabs plus the vertical grab mounted to the top chord, with the topmost end grab being almost directly below the vertical one, giving a doubled effect near the top of the car. The 8400 series car has 4 end grabs, without the grab nearest the top of the car.

Compared to the model, the model is actually molded with locations for 6 grab irons. With the amount of cars I am working on, I decided it was not worth the amount of effort it would take to competely remove all of the molded bolt detail and the pre-molded drilling dimples and trying to make a template to re-drill it all to have 5 evenly spaced grabs instead of 6. (For the 8200/8300 series cars, or 4 (without the top one) for the 8400 series cars.) However, removing the detail for the top grab would provide that different visual detail between these two batches of cars. With the extra rung of the model, the spacing doesn’t quite work out perfectly, but the effect is close enough. For the 8400 series cars, I simply carefully carved away the bolt/drilling dimple detail for the top grab from the surface of the body and wet sanded the area with fine (1000-2000 grit) automotive finishing sandpaper.

The remaining dimples are all drilled out with a tiny #80 drill bit in a pin vise.

With the holes all drilled out, the grab irons can be installed. These are 18″ drop grabs. These formed wire details are available from several sources such as Tichy, Details Associates, Details West, etc. I place a drop of CA on a scrap piece of plastic and carefully dip the tails of the formed wire grab irons

To maintain a proper even depth for all the grabs, I use a piece of .030″ strip as a spacer when installing each grab:

Using styrene spacer to install end grab irons.

When installing the grabs, cut the tails to length before installing; the open space inside the car end will be filled with the large metal weight that comes with the car, so these can’t extend into the interior. I trim the tails shorter before installation with a pair of flush cutters, and once installed and the glue is dried, finish off the interior with a few swipes of a flat needle file so the weight will sit properly into the cavity.

By comparison, the top grab is a straight 18″ grab. I used my calipers to line up the locations of the drill holes for the top grab with the end ladder and drilled them out as close to the edge of the strip as possible. This offsets the grab from the end and lines it up vertically with the end grabs. The grab is inserted (without trimming the tails in this case) from the bottom using tweezers and CAed in place, using my same .030″ spacer to obtain an even level on the grab. Once the CA sets, I cut the tails off with my flush cutters and file the ends of the wire flush with the top of the cap strip.

Here we can see both version of the car with the end and top grab irons installed; 8201-8400 series car at left, 8401-8500 series car at right:

Finished grab irons. 8201-8400 series (left) and 8401-8500 series (right) versions.

End Platforms

I’ve also been working on drilling and installing the grab irons on the end platforms of the car underframes. Nothing fancy here, just drill out the provided dimples and install the grab irons.

Finished end and platform grabs.

All of the drilling was completed first; I’m working my way through installing the grab irons and that part is still in progress on the majority of the cars. About half a dozen of the bodies are complete so far. You might note in the backgrounds of the photos above that the deck grating on a large number of the frames still also needs to be completed yet, so it will still take a while to get all 25 cars completely up to this point, though I may progress some cars to the next point even while still catching up with some of the others.

This completes the major visible body detailing. The next major assemblies to figure out will be the altered end handrails for these cars, and the underframe detailing, which will be more or less installed as intended by the original kit and which should complete the assembly of these cars.

25 Hopper Interiors Completed

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Chris van der Heide

Slowly but surely over the last few weeks I’ve been working on completing the interior detailing on all of the Walthers hoppers I’ve stripped so far. That’s a total of 25 cars currently in progress at the same time. (This actually represents a little under half my current fleet of these cars.)

These twenty-five cars now have the interior bracing and the treatment to the top chord completed. I explain the modifications a bit more in this previous post, but the process basically involves patching the holes on the inside of the body (where the solid bulkhead part from the stock model was fitted) with body putty, adding the extended lip over the end of the car, filing the top of the sides smooth, instead of the peaked side on the model representing an angle iron for stiffening, and finally installing the new interior bracing. On the older cars I did, I fashioned the bracing from .040″ brass wire, but I’ve now taken to using 3/64″ (.047″) styrene rod from Evergreen to make these, as it’s far easier to file and work with, and the welded styrene-styrene bond is stronger and more flexible than the brittle CA bond to glue the brass to the plastic body.

Now i just need to get the other twenty end platforms all up to the same point…

Algoma Central in HO Scale

Modelling the Algoma Central Railway in HO scale

Category Archives: Freight Cars