Another car lettered with CDS dry transfers:
Still need to add the re-weigh shop & date (the CDS set only had one for the 1952 NEW date) which I’ll need to pull out of another set in my stock, and extra details such as the ACI label, lube stencils and U-1 wheel inspection dot. And also weather this thing within an inch of its life, as this represents the original paint scheme for this car, and in 1985 it’s over 30 years old.
This is a project I pulled out of the pile on the back burner.
This boxcar was an undecorated Intermountain model of a 10’0″ interior height boxcar, which I painted some time ago, and started work on the lettering, but then it got left aside.
The model was assembled from the kit as intended, except I also added a small piece of .020x.020″ strip along the botton of the sill tab at the truck bolsters to represent the jacking plate that pretty much all CN 10’0″ cars had at the bolster. The model was then airbrushed with TrueLine Trains “Mineral Brown”.
The lettering is a rub-on dry transfer set from C-D-S Lettering. Using dry transfers is quite a bit different than water slide decals, and there are a few advantages and disadvantages to both. Dry transfers apply just the lettering to the finished model and have no decal film to deal with. You can finish a model relatively quickly with them, and do both sides in an evening since you don’t have to wait for decals to dry. You don’t have the chance to move a dry transfer into position once on the model; it needs to be positioned exactly and held in place while you burnish it onto the model. It helps to apply a small piece of tape to the corners once the sheet with the lettering is located in place. The main disadvantage of dry transfers is in the smallest lettering; the printing process doesn’t allow as fine of detail as can be printed on decal paper. Also multi-coloured graphics (not an issue here with the all-white CN lettering) on C-D-S sets have the different colours printed separately.
I finally pulled this car out and finished off the lettering (except for the last couple of numbers on the Capacity and Load Limit data – that needs to be completed yet). The extra little detail bits (the yellow & black wheel inspection dot, COTS data block and ACI bar-code label) were added from various Microscale data sets.
A little bit of weathering and installation of the couplers, and this car will be just about ready for service hauling various cargos on the remote branchlines of Northern Ontario.
So in a follow-up comment on one of my previous posts, I mentioned that the ExactRail CP 65′ gondolas are modeled after a series of cars built in 1979 by Hawker-Siddeley, and to which an identical series of cars was built in 1982 by Marine Industries. The ExactRail models all bear numbers drawn from the 1979 HST series, but have Marine Industries builders logos and 1982 NEW dates. (Naturally.) This is a little annoying, but fixable.
The various CP series that may be represented by the ExactRail model (with varying amounts of work) are:
| Series | Builder | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| CP 336700-336799 | NSC | 10-11/1965 | Flat ends, high brake rigging |
| CP 337185-337299 | HST | 11-12/1979 | Ribbed end, low brake rigging |
| CP 337300-337449 | ? | 6-7/1969 | Flat end, high brake rigging |
| CP 337450-337549 | MIL | 4-5/1982 | Ribbed end, low brake rigging |
You can follow my efforts to model a car from the 1965 336700-336799 series in this other series of posts.
I’ve been endeavoring to correct some of the other ExactRail cars I have, removing the Marine Industries logo and adding in the Hawker-Siddeley logo. The old lettering can be removed by VERY carefully scraping with a curved scalpel blade. Done very lightly and carefully, this can remove the printed lettering without damaging the paint underneath. Another method I’ve used to successfully remove lettering is to rub it with a Micro-Sol soaked Q-tip.
The Hawker-Siddeley logos came from a Microscale data set of various freight car builder logos (set # MC-4309).
The original Marine Industries logo is at left in the below photo, and the Hawker-Siddeley logo and placement is illustrated on the car to the right.
I haven’t addressed changing the new date by the weight data lettering below the car number yet; I probably will, but that will involve piecing some things together from some proper CP data lettering (which I will need to make sure I have).
To maintain a little bit of variety, I also wanted to leave one car as representing the later Marine Industries, which would allow keeping the existing MIL logos and build date data, but require renumbering the car into the new series. The snag here of course is that the numbers on these gondolas are a bit smaller than the standard numbers on other cars, so the reporting marks and numbers from standard CP Rail lettering sets don’t fit here. Naturally I fully realized this after I removed the car number from the car. (D’oh.) Hopefully I’ll be able to turn up some appropriate letters to redo the car number on that car so I can have a car from the MIL series. If not, I suppose I’ll have to rebuild it into second black NSC car from the 1965 336700-336799 series…
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Last week I stripped up to 20 of my Walther hoppers in preparation for detailing. I’m currently working on the interiors of these cars, puttying the slots and holes where the bulkhead pieces used to go and preparing for the interior bracing remodeling. This brings the total number of these cars currently in production to 27, and that’s less than half of what I have stockpiled. I’m hoping to bring this batch of about 2 dozen up to about the same point and then proceed with the next steps as I figure them out in assembly-line fashion. So it might be a little bit while I catch up, and then hopefully you’ll see new posts on that topic.
In my previous post, I cut away and replaced the ends on an ExactRail 65′ Hawker-Siddeley CP gondola to backdate the model to an older National Steel Car version of a similar car. After a couple more evenings of work, the car now has its new corner ladders installed.
The last bit of major surgery on the car body was to carve away the top chord over the last panel on the right hand side of the car, as the NSC cars have a notch here for taller ladders. Comparing prototype photos of the NSC and H-S (which the stock model represents) versions, the NSC car has a 5-rung ladder with closer spacing compared to a 4-rung ladder on the H-S car. With the top chord cut away, the area was filed smooth and the new notched bit formed out of a scale 2″x6″ top piece and an angled bit cut and filed from a piece of 6″x6″. This little assembly was then cemented in place, and the cracks and seams filled in with Bondo body putty. (At this time the seams between the new end and the sides of the car body were also touched up with body putty.)
After the putty set up overnight, everything was filed and wet-sanded smooth. Then the ladders could be installed.
The ladders are cut to length from Tichy 8-rung boxcar ladders, and the rung spacing works out perfectly. Note the sides have a 5-rung ladder, and the ends have a shorter 4-rung ladder. The rungs of the side and end ladders align which each other. Note also that on the H-S car, the ladders are mounted below the heavy top chord, but on the NSC car that the modified model is intended to represent the top rung of the ladder is in front of the shallow top chord on the end, and located within a notch in the heavy side top chord.
Also unlike the later H-S car, which has ladders at every corner of the car, the opposite corners on the NSC car just have a pair of grab irons instead of full ladders. The next step will involve drilling and installed these, and a few other minor details, and then I’ll be able to tackle the underframe modifications.
A good portion of the traffic on the Algoma Central is finished steel products, and as a 300 mile wilderness route with no industrial users of this steel, basically one hundred percent of this traffic was interchanged to other railways, particularly in Sault Ste. Marie (CP and SOO Line), Oba (CN) and to a lesser extent Franz (CP). As such, CN and CP also provided a certain amount of cars for steel loading, so open cars from these railways would also be a regular sight on Algoma Central trains.
A few years ago, ExactRail released a model in their “Signature Series” of a Canadian Pacific 65′ gondola. This car is based on a version of a car built in the early to mid 1970s by Hawker-Siddeley and Marine Industries. Many of these are still in service today, so this is an excellent choice to be a part of my Canadian Pacific fleet. To add a little variety to the several cars I’ve collected, I’ve always been intending to take at least one car and backdate it to a late 1960s National Steel Car version of the same car. The NSC version is almost identical, having the same overall dimensions, number of side ribs, tie downs, etc., but has different ends and ladder arrangements. While the later HST/MIL cars have a distinctive ribbed end, the NSC car’s end is a solid, flat panel. Also, the NSC cars were built just before the introduction of CP Rail’s new “MultiMark” paint scheme, and were thus delivered in the older black paint. Interestingly, these cars were painted in simple block lettering, even though the Canadian Pacific script lettering was then the current lettering scheme in use at the time.
CP 336702 at Guelph Junction, sometime in the 1990s. Jurgen Kleylein photo.
The first step was to disassemble the car and remove most of the little detail bits. Then I cut away the original end with a razor saw and cleaned things up with a file. The side extensions that cap off the horizontal end ribs were also cut back and the bottom rib, which is below the level of the interior floor on the model, was carved away and things filed smooth. Then a plate of .040″ thick styrene was installed in the opening to form the core of the new end. The surface of this plate needs to be flush with the rest of the cleaned up end for the rest of the project to work.
With the core of the new end in place, I cut away the protruding tail ends of the top chords of the sides flush with the end plate, and started framing in the new end with a 2×6 top chord and 2×4 framing around the sides and bottom. (Actually in the photo below I goofed and used a 4×6 on the top chord, which roughly matched the thickness of the top chord on the sides, but checking the prototype photo above, you can see it’s not actually that prominent on the end and is a lot more flush, so I had to cut this away and replace it with thinner material.)
The basic assembly of the end was then finished off by cutting and filing a rectangle of .010″ styrene to fit snugly inside the end framing. Ladders and other details still need to be re-added, but here you can see the assembled end compared to the original ExactRail end on the car to the left.
