Freight Car Friday #39 – GTW 187977

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Today’s entry looks at a modern CN coil steel car.

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Photographed at Hawk Junction from the vestibule of the northbound passenger train, GTW 187977 is an example of one of several batches of modern cars built by National Steel Car for CN from 2006-2008 and assigned the reporting marks of CN’s subsidiary Grand Trunk Western. Currently there are a total of 890 of these NSC built cars from GTW 187400-188289, following 369 similar cars built in 2000-2003 with plain grey markings and CN numbers from CN 187000-187368.

ONT 9′ Door Boxcar Rebuild (AC 2917)

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A while back I stripped the paint on a handful of True Line Trains 40′ Ontario Northland boxcars in preparation for modifying and repainting them as cars acquired second hand by the Algoma Central for LCL and company service. Naturally, these then sat on the workbench for a while awaiting detailing and painting while I tackled other projects. Last night I pulled these back out in order to start finishing off the details and get them ready for painting.

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First up is this car which will end up representing AC 2917. This car was built in 1947-48 by National Steel Car for Ontario Northland and rebuilt by the ONR in the early 1960s with a 9′ door opening. This rebuild required reinforcing of the side sill below the door opening and new door tracks. Note that the new doors used were taller than the original doors, being meant for a 10’6″ interior height car while the Ontario Northland boxcars were older cars with a 10’0″ interior height, so the door tracks in addition to being longer to accommodate the larger size of the door are mounted lower down.

The doors on the True Line model are unfortunately molded as part of the car body, so the first step of the major modification was to cut this opening out entirely. The side sills also had to be carefully cut off along the bottom edge of the car body so that new side sills and door tracks cut from styrene strip could be added. I don’t really recall where the doors came from originally, I pulled them out of my parts box where they’ve been for a while.

After removing the ladders and brake detail, original mounting holes were filled in with round styrene rod and the ladders were shortened and reattached. Tackboards on the doors and ends are original parts from the model relocated. The brake wheel housing was also remounted lower down.

This car just requires a few more of the brake detail parts to be re-applied on the “B” end of the car, and also the addition of a new horizontal grab iron on each end (I couldn’t find my small diameter brass wire last night) to complete the detailing. Then it should be ready for the paint shop.

I have a few more cars that basically just need all of the ladder and brake detailing work done which I hope to complete over the next week and then I should have a small fleet of about half a dozen ex-Ontario Northland boxcars for work and wayfreight service.

Freight Car Friday #38 – FURX Coil Steel Gondolas

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Today’s post features additional coil steel cars leased to Canadian Pacific, and commonly seen carrying steel coils eastward from Essar Steel Algoma over the Huron Central to interchange with CP at Sudbury.

These cars with FURX reporting marks are part of a group of 100 cars leased to Essar Steel Algoma from First Union Rail, the rail leasing and financing arm of First Union Bank. These cars were originally built by Alstom in 1999 as part of NOKL 380601-380850 series.

Officially the NOKL reporting marks are registered to the Northwestern Oklahoma Railroad, but in reality cars with the NOKL reporting mark are owned by First Union and leased to other railroads. Some of these NOKL (like these three here) have been re-marked to FURX and SMW (another First Union managed mark). I’m not sure why First Union sometimes transfers cars between their various marks (FURX, NDYX, NOKL and SMW) but I’m sure there is a organizing system to this in their accounting department and may or may not have something to do with whether a railroad or private operator is leasing the cars.

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Three photos taken by myself on two separate visits in 2013.

Recently, a group of these FURX/NOKL cars have been rotating through Ontario Northland Railway’s car shops in North Bay for inspection and repairs prior to lease return; they seem to be largely being replaced by the cars leased from CIT Group featured last week.

Freight Car Friday #37 – CIGX Coil Steel Gondolas

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A lot of the rail traffic handled in the Sault Ste. Marie area has always been steel products from the Algoma Steel (now Essar Steel Algoma) mill. With the decline in forestry products from northern Ontario and the closure of the St. Marys Paper mill in Sault Ste. Marie (previously served by the former ACR), the Essar traffic is truly in the majority.

Essar produces many types of steel products including plate, pipe, beams and of course thin sheet steel (which is shipped in large coils). These CIGX marked cars represent a large proportion of the cars currently carrying steel coils eastbound over the Huron Central and Canadian Pacific.

These particular cars are leased (presumably by either CP or Essar Steel Algoma) from CIT Group, and these number series appear to have materialized in 2012-2013. These are all second-hand cars from a few different sources.

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Our first example, CIGX 803021 was actually originally built in 1999 by Thrall Car as part of series CP 346300-346499. It was re-marked CIGX in late 2012 or early 2013.

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CIGX 803049 was built by National Steel Car in 1999 or 2000, and is likely ex-TR. TR translates to Tomahawk Railway, but this is likely one of those “marks of convenience” actually used by one of the large leasing companies like CIT, First Union or GE for cars leased to railroads as TR is one of those reporting marks that’s disproportionately common for a 6-mile long shortline railroad. I’m not entirely sure which company actually owns TR marked cars though.

I used to see these cars in their original markings running on CP here in southern Ontario fairly regularly in the early 2000s; it’s possible these were leased to CP back then as well, and the lease conditions or ownership has changed.

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CIGX 802979 is drawn from another series of former TR cars, also built by National Steel Car around 1999-2000 and remarked to CIGX in 2013.

A fair bit of this coil traffic ends up at a transload/distribution operation alongside CP’s former Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo Abderdeen Yard in Hamilton, ON.

It’s a Wrap…

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…wrapped lumber bundle that is.

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I’ve been spending some time lately working on making up some wrapped lumber bundles that can be used to put together some flatcar loads (and any extras will be saved to make stacks of finished lumber around the mill property when I build that location on my layout.

These bundles are wooden blocks wrapped in paper printed with custom graphics matching the logos used by Newaygo Forest Products. Since Newaygo is a bit of an obscure operation compared to say, Canfor (Canadian Forest Products) or Weyerhauser or other larger lumber companies, I was going to have to come up with a custom solution. Very fortunately I have this Ted Ellis photo of AC 2425 with a Newaygo lumber load as well as a straight-on photo of the sign in front of the old Newaygo office still standing at Mead to work from in order to draw out the logo and letter font.

I am not particularly proficient with graphic design or Photoshop, but I was able to draw out the logo and text using the 3D drawing program Sketchup, as the squarish logo and letters with rounded corners actually lead themselves nicely to being drawn with this program, and then exported the front view as a PNG image, which I cleaned up a little with Paint and resulted in the graphic below:

Newaygo Royale lumber wrap graphics single

The bottom line “Newaygo Forest Products Ltd.” was a bit of a guess, as you can’t really quite make out that lettering in the Ted Ellis photo, but this prints out pretty small in the end result and you have to really lead in close to read it. Feels about right though.

My dad’s hobby is woodworking, and he has a pretty nicely fitted out workshop at his house. As I am fortunately currently living in my hometown again, an evening visit to my parents place last week with a couple of hours with my dad in his workshop turned a scrap piece of 2×6 into a large pile of wooden blocks sized for scale bundles of lumber in 8′, 10′, 12′ and 16′ stud lengths. The original block of wood was ripped into small strips using the table saw, and then the strips cut off to length using a band saw with carefully measured fence distances.

The final sizes of the blocks are 8mm tall by 13mm wide/deep, with lengths of 28mm (scale 8′ stud bundle), 35mm (10′), 42mm (12′) or 56mm (16′).

Since then I’ve slowly been cleaning up the blocks by sanding off any surface burrs and splinters (I’ve got a large pile to go through yet!) and started gluing on the paper wraps on a few blocks to start getting some finished pieces. I’ve got to finish off quite a few more in order to start assembling a load, but when I’m done wrapping all the blocks we cut last week, I should have enough to do at least half a dozen various loads with some left over for lumber mill scenery in the future.

If anyone else modelling the ACR or upper Michigan (or just looking for something a bit different) would like to print off some graphics to make their own Newaygo load(s), I’ve uploaded a ready-to-print PDF file which will print off a series of graphics to the correct size for HO scale bundles.