Freight Car Friday #47 – MWCX Copper Concentrate Gondolas

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One interesting source of current bridge traffic over the former Algoma Central is copper concentrate heading over the Ontario Northland Railway to be smelted at the large facility at Rouyn-Noranda, QC. This traffic apparently comes from the Michigan “Upper Peninsula” from the concentrator at the Humboldt Mill which was recently rebuilt and started ore production in 2014 and travels across CN up to Hearst to interchange with the ONR. The three photos of MWCX cars in this post were photographed on July 16, 2015 in Cochrane, Ontario, but had just arrived from Hearst that day. Several more cars (possibly even the same ones actually) were seen from a distance in the northern section of Hawk Junction yard a few days earlier.

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MWCX 200115 is an older car originally built by Greenville Steel Car for the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad, and has had a few interim owners since them, one notable operator of these former P&LE cars being the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad. Its acquisition by Midwest Railcar Leasing (MWCX) is pretty recent however.

This closeup shot shows a fair amount of load spillage around the top edges of the car; you can see the buildup of the greenish-coloured ore copper ore concentrate in the dust on the side of the car.

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This car, MWCX 200475, is a good example of the modern gondola on today’s railways, having been built in early 2015. One other car in this set of five was also built in 2014, and the others were older, but clearly quite recently shopped and repainted in 2014-2015.

While this movement (and certainly in these particular cars) seems to be a fairly new one, copper mining in the upper Michigan area seems to have been a sort of on-again, off-again affair, and shipments of ores from the states to the Noranda smelter seem to have occurred at various times in the past, so I might be able to make some sort of justification for adding a bit of this sort of traffic onto my eventual layout. (In older, contemporary cars of course.) There also seems to be some westward (to or from) interchange of ore concentrates in CN cars at Oba, possibly from as far away as Trail, British Columbia.

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This SOO gondola photographed on July 17, 2013 in Sudbury (cars seen here would have been routed to/from points south via the ONR, OVR and CP) also shows telltale weathering of having been in concentrate service and provides a good look at the inside of the car. Note the caked-on greenish gray concentrate material on the interior sides. Today concentrates are shipped with fiberglass covers applied to the cars to prevent any loss in transit for both economic and, significantly, environmental concerns, but in the 1970s and early 1980s the stuff was actually shipped open. Bram Bailey’s book “Ontario Northland in Color” from Morning Sun Books has a couple of photos of trains with concentrate gondolas and a large greenish dust cloud trailing behind it…

Work Car Wednesday #3

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ac10607

AC 10607 is one of the railway’s older bunk cars built from old 36′ wooden boxcars. Once the railway had several very similar or identical bunk cars all around the 1060x number range, but 10607 definitely appears to have been the last survivor from this era.

This car was assigned to the diesel hoist operator as a sleeping car. Photographed in the early 1990s at Steelton yard by Blair Smith, it was freshly repainted into this eye-catching bright yellow in 1982.

A few more lumber wrap graphics

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I did some playing around this evening with downloading some company logos and making a few more variations on lumber wrap graphics. Some of these are modern, some a few years old. Most aren’t necessarily applicable to what I’m doing with the Algoma Central, but a couple of these were pretty easy to do with logos taken from online.

I used Excel this time to create a template worksheet to consistently line everything up to the millimeter for printing. These also include marks for cutting the edge of the wrapper, particularly as some of the wraps have some white space around the edges.

As my posts on the Newaygo load have generated a significant amount of interest I’m sharing the printable PDF files for each one here.

Newaygo Forest Products (Mead, ON) – 1974-1984 Reprint PDF – Prototype

Tembec – up to 2012 PDF – Prototype

Tembec – 2012+ PDF – Prototype

Lecours Lumber (Calstock, ON) – Current PDF – Prototype

Interfor (International Forest Products) – Current (Style 1) PDF – Prototype

Interfor (International Forest Products) – Current (Style 2) PDF – Prototype

TOLKO – ~1990 PDF – Prototype

Blank Excel Template – XLSX

(These are of course all sized for HO scale.)

Newaygo Lumber Loads

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So a couple months back, I showed the first few completed blocks representing wrapped lumber bundles for Newaygo Forest Products which operated a sawmill at Mead from roughly 1974-1985. Well over the last two months, that small pile of about half a dozen blocks has turned in to a much larger pile of blocks in four different lengths, and I’ve been able to start building the first few loads.

This is the first full-size load completed and I probably have enough material for at least 8 to 10 more.

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The blocks are glued together into a solid mass with scale stripwood spacers between the blocks, paying close attention to how the blocks align and staggering different lengths to represent how the load would be secured as a cohesive unit. In the model world, the load is all glued together, but in the real world it’s all held together with strapping. (Spend some time studying older photos of lumber loads on standard (not the modern centre-partition lumber cars which are loaded a little differently) flatcars to see how the bundles are secured together.) The strapping on the model is represented with 1/64″ wide Chartpak graphics tape, which actually roughly scales out to about 1.5″ wide, not too oversize.

It’s taken a LOT of work to get to this point (researching, creating the graphics on the computer when I’m not an expert at graphics design and drawing programs, cutting all the blocks (actually that part just took an hour or two), **sanding** all the blocks (and this week’s Blu-ray movie selection(s) are…), gluing the paper wrappers on all the blocks, cutting the stripwood spacers for the load, finally building the load, and applying the strapping details) but the end result totally kicks the pants off some generic block of plastic or resin, the graphics actually match the particular prototype mill that the railroad served, and each load can be a little varied and completely unique from each other. This load ended up with a slight gap in the top row. I plan to have others with the small gaps at the ends, hopefully a few that are actually solid, and at least one with only a half row on the top.

I’ve also made four of these little loads for the 40′ cars based on a pair of late 1970s photos.

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These cars were non-interchange though at this point, so presumably anything being shipped on these would have to be transloaded in the Sault. These small cars also have about a third of the capacity of the larger, more modern 52′ bulkheads so they probably won’t get used regularly, but might be thrown in occasionally for some variation. The rest of the loads I build will all be for the larger cars that will typically be used.

Woodchip Gondola Basic Underframe and Body Assembly

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Another project starting to look like something.

I’ve been slowly working on the basic underframe for these three cars over the last several weeks, and this afternoon I got the all of the body components put together.

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There’s a lot of underframe & body details to do yet, obviously, but with the main pieces assembled into bodies, they at least start to give the impression of what these will look like.

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