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 circumstances this weekend allowed me to take the opportunity to hit a train show/sale today in Ancaster, Ontario. (On Saturday I travelled to a friend’s place in Kitchener for a murder mystery dinner party; it was a lot of fun and the murder was succesfuly caught! I stayed over and then left for Ancaster in the morning to catch a bit of the show and also visit some family in the area.
I’d never been to this particular show before. It was primarily a flea market/sale show; with lots of secondhand tables plus several established hobby shops and dealers. It’s not the largest show in the area, but it did completely fill the exhibition hall at the Ancaster fairgrounds. There was only one operating layout that I saw; a small modular N scale layout which was unfortunately placed at the end of the outer hallway instead of the main hall. I believe this particular event has always been billed as more of a flea market type show than others (although all train shows always have the various vendors, both dealers and the private individuals sellings surplus items) so I guess I wasn’t too surprised or disappointed by the lack of layouts, but the layouts are always a fun thing to look at at most shows, and really the best way to attract new people.
I did personally manage to get a couple of good bargains at the show this afternoon. The first was pretty much immediately after I passed the admission table. This pair of CP newsprint boxcars was $20 for the pair. They weren’t boxed, but the bodies were undamaged and in good shape and the little plastic baggies with the extra parts for the ladders and door bars for both cars were in there. Since you can easily pay more than that for just one (indeed I saw similar cars at other booths in the main hall for >$20 a piece), I couldn’t resist, even though I probably already have more of these newsprint boxcars than I need so far. (These cars could have been seen over the ACR in paper/woodpulp service from the CP interchange at Franz down to Sault Ste Marie.) I can always bring some extras down to the club for service (we have a huge paper service fleet there) and I have some nefarious ideas kicking around in the back of my mind for some severe rebuild projects that would use these as donors…
I got this Walthers diesel crane from another secondhand table. With a few modifications, this is a good candidate to be turned into AC 10216. Actually it might end up taking some major modifications to the body, but this particular prototype crane and the model are both built by American Crane and there are some common parts and features. The AC crane appears to be a heavier model with a larger body, but the operator’s cab, and the lower frame and a few other pieces are the same, so this will be a good starting point for an interesting project. Stay tuned for more on that sometime in the future, I think I can promise that!
The rest of these cars I got at more or less regular price from a couple of the regular dealers.
This SOO Line car is a model made by Fox Valley Models of a car with some features that were unique to SOO Line; these cars were built by SOO in their own shops at Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. This model has taken a little bit of flak in some prototype modeling circles for the side ribs being too shallow, but overall I like the look of it, and it captures a signature car of the SOO Line railroad. I recently acquired a collection of old slides taken on the ACR (basically all unlabeled and undated, but certain indicators suggest the date to be around 1978-79); while varying in image quality, they include a sequence of images from a cab ride on a freight from the Sault to Hawk, and a caboose ride from Hawk to Michipicoten. In one slide you can just make out a pair of SOO boxcars farther back near the rear of the train. While I have no evidence as to what they would be carrying, a reasonable supposition is that they represent some minor bridge traffic to either the CP or CN interchange at Franz or Oba. Whatever the case, I do have photographic proof that this is an appropriate car to be seen operating over the ACR in my time frame.
The CN reefer below I picked up primarily for occasional express or less-than-carload (LCL) at the ramp at Hearst. However, I’ve also seen a slide in Helmut Ostermann’s collection taken at Hawk Junction that clearly shows one of these cars coupled behind the engines switching at Hawk. Unfortunately I have no other information on what the CN reefer would be doing travelling over the ACR. Bridge traffic to northern Michigan? Possibly actually local express traffic for Hawk Junction or Wawa freight sheds, which still existed in those days, although I don’t really know when they were last active.
The ACFX tank car is a car in Liquefied Petroleum Gas service – generally this translates to propane. There was a propane dealer in Hearst (served by CN) and one in Wawa (served of course by the ACR) that I can use this car for. The model has a 1985 service date stencilled on it, so it represents a fresh repaint in my targeted era. ACFX is an American lease mark, and pre-NAFTA it would probably be more appropriate to see more Procor and CGTX (Canadian General Transit) cars, but ACFX cars definitely did operate north of the border then as well, and this car is most definitely era appropriate, so I can make an excuse for including it.
Ok, this one really has nothing to do with the Algoma Central, but I just love these oddball cars. This CP 40′ boxcar is a project that I’ve been working on that will ultimately see service down at my model railway club.
The prototype for this car is one of a very small group of 40′ boxcars that were rebuilt to increase the internal capacity for hauling appliances (i.e. kitchen stoves, etc.). I built this model from an Intermountain 40′ boxcar kit, performing a similar chop job, splicing the various bits with sheet styrene to increase the height. The Intermountain kit has separate ends, doors and roof pieces which really lends itself to this conversion job.
I got this car painted red quite some time ago, and it’s been languishing on the shelf for a while behind other projects and life in general. This evening I finally moved it back into the paint shop to spray on the black part of the “multimark” logo. This stretched car also had a stretched multimark to fit the area beside the door, so this was masked and painted on, making this a three-colour paint job. (The white was done first (after a grey primer), then the red, and then finally this evening, the black.)
Now it’s finally ready for decals!
On my trip to Sault Ste Marie to ride the Tour of the Line, I got to see and photograph a few examples of surviving original AC equipment.
At the yard at Steelton was a string of 5 AC gondolas loaded with track panel sections for emergency track repair and replacement work.
A similar set of 5 gondolas was also on hand at Hawk Junction. Note that the closest car in this string is an older 48′ gondola!
These AC gons are extremely rare now. The only remaining examples are in maintenance service like these, having long been removed from any sort of revenue service. These could even be among the last 10 survivors (of the 52′ gons), although there could be a few more still in similar service on former WC lines.
Also at Steelton yard is one of the former AC steel cabooses (acquired secondhand by the AC from Canadian Pacific around 1990-91) and one of the AC’s two original steel snowplows (although the plow has several years before been repainted into WC maroon and gold colours). These were screened by the gondolas and other junk and equipment from where the passenger train boards, but fortunately I got shots from the other side using my 200mm zoom lens on my July trip:
I also saw a few AC marked pulpwood flatcars on both trips, although it’s hard to call these original survivors, since the grey AC 238100 series pulpwood cars were rebuilt from former CP cars in 1998, well after the Wisconsin Central takeover.
Also, though it was located much farther back in the shops area and wasn’t accessible for photographs, heavyweight business car “Agawa” is still hanging around the former AC property. I have no information on the disposition of former AC business car “Michipicoten”.
Finally, I’m not sure whether you can consider this a “survivor”, but this old ex-Ontario Northland work boxcar was sitting in the weeds alongside a maintenance spur near the Oba lake “floating” trestles:
Not bad for 18 1/2 years after the end of the Algoma Central as an independent railway. (The WC sale was official on Feb 1, 1995.)
