CP 305513 Bulkhead Flatcar Kitbash

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This week I had a chance to spend some time bringing an older project back onto the work bench – a kitbash of a somewhat lesser-known obscure Canadian Pacific bulkhead flatcar design.

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This example was photographed by fellow WRMRC member Jurgen Kleylein in work train service in or near Sudbury in the late 1990s. It’s actually an interesting example of a prototype kitbash, as it is one of a 60-car series rebuilt with bulkhead ends from standard flatcars. Naturally given such a unique look, I had to plan to do one myself.

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I started with an old Life-Like Proto2000 53′ flatcar kit, for which I made a new deck from Evergreen scribed sheet, and scratch-built the bulkheads from styrene sheet and strip. The main body construction was actually done some time ago, but the car has been sitting in storage since then waiting for further detailing. So this week I decided to pull this out and complete that job, adding ladders, grab irons and brake hardware.

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This close-up of the end shows most of the major details. The brake hardware is from a Tichy brake details set, and the ladders are also Tichy.

Note the side ladders are mounted with small bits of styrene strip to raise them away from the sides of the wrap-around bulked, as the ladder has pass over the angled edge of the bulkhead. Likewise, as the brake hardware has to be mounted over the ribs on the ends, the brake housing and platform supports are also attached to pieces of styrene strip for mounting.

Lastly, with the final details installed over the last few days, this evening I cleaned and prepared the car for painting, and fired up the airbrush to give it an initial coat of light grey undercoat/primer.

Next up, some CP Action Red.

Freight Car Friday #20 – ACIS 1433

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ACR from Blair 029

ACIS 1433 and two others photographed by Blair Smith at Steelton yard on July 9, 2001.

These three cars are among about half a dozen cars that were retained after the Newaygo sawmill at Mead closed in 1985 and the ACR’s fleet of over a hundred woodchip cars was disposed of. This small group of remaining cars were rebuilt as lumber cars for Dubreuil Brothers lumber in 1986. Here though, these cars appear to have been fixed up with their original end doors reinstalled for woodchip service. I’ve found one or two later photos of these cars in chip service on the CN/WC system in Wisconsin.

Section House Progress

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While I was mostly busy with other things over the Christmas and New Year’s period, I’ve been managing to poke away at a couple of projects and have managed to complete another milestone on my Franz section house project, and now I have my first actual project posting of 2015.

The house is now painted, and has shingles applied.

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The house was airbrushed white and the trim carefully masked and painted Southern Sylvan Green. I had a setback at this point that rather threatened to ruin the entire project – on one side I sprayed a little too heavily with the green and it leaked and spread under the masking. After venting some frustration (“Model Railroading is Fun”?? – MR’s old tagline) including some choice words that would have disappointed my mother, I tried to recover the project by scraping away some of the green paint, and repainting the side again with white to touch it up and once again masking off the trim and windows and then touching up the green.

I think I managed to not botch it too much the second time around. Phew.

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The shingles are a heavy paper product from Rusty Stumps. They are pre-cut for a standard 3-tab shingle pattern and can be ordered with or without an adhesive backing. (Rusty Stumps has several different variations of shingle types available, and different colours are also available. Their dark green will likely come in handy when I build Hawk Junction station…)

You can see above that I have also been working on finishing off the assorted tool and speeder sheds with shingle roofing material as well (I actually completed a few of these over the Christmas season, and applied the last shingles to the section house tonight). Some of these small structures are known to have tarpaper/roll roofing but I’ve managed to source some photos here and there and some of the specific locations I’m intending these for (Franz, Mosher) had shingle roofing on these sheds. Even some of the different section houses had varying roofing and siding treatments, with some of them also having tar paper roofing as well. Franz however, is well documented as having normal black asphalt shingles.

All of the model structures just need a ridge cap applied yet to complete the roofing treatment.

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Here we see what the Franz section house would look like in context with its storage shed, although you kind of have to imagine a forest around and behind it, a nearby outhouse, and chances are when I actually build Franz, you’ll end up looking at the back of the house from the aisle.

It’s taken a while, and had it’s bumps along the way, but I’m happy that these structures are really starting to look a bit more like the real ones they represent.