Freight Car Friday #12 – CP 344702

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This Canadian Pacific gondola is one of a series outfitted with coil steel bunks and normally has a protective fiberglass cover applied to it to protect the steel coils (you can see some similar covered cars in the background) but here the cover is missing and you can see into the interior and see how the coil bunks and bracing are designed.

CN and CP both supplied a lot of cars for steel loading at Algoma Steel, so covered gondolas like this would not have been an uncommon site in the Algoma Central yards in Sault Ste. Marie, and CP traffic to western Canada would have been interchanged at Franz.

This car was photographed on July 30, 2014 in the CP yard at Sudbury so it would actually be on the way to Sault Ste. Marie for a load of steel coils.

Tool Shed Doors and Trim

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A little bit more work on these sheds this evening and the corners and door frames are all trimmed, and doors cut to fit the opening.

The doors are cut from a sheet of simple scribed siding (Evergreen “Car Siding”) to fit tightly into the door opening. The door frame is trimmed with .010x.060″ strip.

Unlike the speeder sheds, I added all of the corner trim after assembly using strip styrene. To do this somewhat balanced, I used a scale 1×4 strip (.011x.044″) first on the sides to cover the exposed edge of the front wall sheet, and a .010x.060″ strip on the front and rear ends, overlapping the edge of the side strip. This makes the overall angle of the corner trim about .060″ on the front side and .055″ on the side. Close enough to appear pretty square to the eye and look just right.

More Small Tool Sheds for the ACR

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Here’s another grouping of small tool/materiel storage sheds, following a common ACR pattern. These storage sheds are commonly found with the section houses that dot the line at periodic intervals that once supported track maintenance workers. Below can be seen a classic example with the old section bunkhouse at Franz:

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And this similar shed is almost obscured in the weeds and bushes behind Searchmont station, but appears to follow the same pattern and dimensions, although comparing photos of various sheds at different locations, some of the minor details like the position of doors (either centered, or offset to the left or right on the front of the shed) and windows (some on the rear wall as at Searchmont, and other examples showing a small window on one side of the shed) vary a bit from one example to the next.

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Nathan Brown of the Searchmont Station Preservation & Historical Society was able to send me the following measured dimensions of the existing shed at Searchmont, which were extremely helpful in laying out the pieces for these sheds. Thanks Nathan for the data!

Hey Chris,
Here are the specs on the shed behind the station.

Door: 4ft 10inches from left

2ft 6in opening

window:

4ft 4in from left

5ft 2 in from right

6ft 5in from the peak

3ft 5in from ground

2ft 8 1/2 in opening

shed size is 14 f 3.5 in x 12ft 4.5 inches

Armed with a collection of different photos of various section locations, and particularly of Perry, Franz, and Mosher, which locations I’ll hopefully include in my future layout, I was able to lay out three similar sheds. I don’t have shots that show all four sides of any of these structures but I do have at least one photo at each location showing the shed or part of the shed to know where the front door was located. Given the lack of photos of the rear and both sides, the small window locations were somewhat freelanced based on positions shown in collected photos of similar sheds at different locations. (Each shed has only one window, and on each of the three models below I located it in a different place, but always following precedents shown in prototype photographs.)

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Freight Car Friday #11 – ASCX Gondolas

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These three old 48′ gondolas photographed in behind the Algoma Steel tube mill at Sault Ste. Marie/Steelton in August 2004 are former Algoma Central cars originally built in 1947 by National Steel Car in series AC 3501-3850. Most of their original lettering has been obliterated but traces of the bear logo is peeking through on all three cars. The 128 below appears to a late 1950s brown repaint.

SAMSUNG DIGIMAX 360

SAMSUNG DIGIMAX 360