Tag Archives: Canadian Pacific

A couple of scores today at the Ancaster Train Show

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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…

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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!

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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.

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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.

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Backdated ExactRail 65′ CP Gondola – Part 2: Corner ladders

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In my previous post, I cut away and replaced the ends on an ExactRail 65′ Hawker-Siddeley CP gondola to backdate the model to an older National Steel Car version of a similar car. After a couple more evenings of work, the car now has its new corner ladders installed.

The last bit of major surgery on the car body was to carve away the top chord over the last panel on the right hand side of the car, as the NSC cars have a notch here for taller ladders. Comparing prototype photos of the NSC and H-S (which the stock model represents) versions, the NSC car has a 5-rung ladder with closer spacing compared to a 4-rung ladder on the H-S car. With the top chord cut away, the area was filed smooth and the new notched bit formed out of a scale 2″x6″ top piece and an angled bit cut and filed from a piece of 6″x6″. This little assembly was then cemented in place, and the cracks and seams filled in with Bondo body putty. (At this time the seams between the new end and the sides of the car body were also touched up with body putty.)

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After the putty set up overnight, everything was filed and wet-sanded smooth. Then the ladders could be installed.

The ladders are cut to length from Tichy 8-rung boxcar ladders, and the rung spacing works out perfectly. Note the sides have a 5-rung ladder, and the ends have a shorter 4-rung ladder. The rungs of the side and end ladders align which each other. Note also that on the H-S car, the ladders are mounted below the heavy top chord, but on the NSC car that the modified model is intended to represent the top rung of the ladder is in front of the shallow top chord on the end, and located within a notch in the heavy side top chord.

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Also unlike the later H-S car, which has ladders at every corner of the car, the opposite corners on the NSC car just have a pair of grab irons instead of full ladders. The next step will involve drilling and installed these, and a few other minor details, and then I’ll be able to tackle the underframe modifications.

Backdated ExactRail 65′ CP Gondola – Part 1

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A good portion of the traffic on the Algoma Central is finished steel products, and as a 300 mile wilderness route with no industrial users of this steel, basically one hundred percent of this traffic was interchanged to other railways, particularly in Sault Ste. Marie (CP and SOO Line), Oba (CN) and to a lesser extent Franz (CP). As such, CN and CP also provided a certain amount of cars for steel loading, so open cars from these railways would also be a regular sight on Algoma Central trains.

A few years ago, ExactRail released a model in their “Signature Series” of a Canadian Pacific 65′ gondola. This car is based on a version of a car built in the early to mid 1970s by Hawker-Siddeley and Marine Industries. Many of these are still in service today, so this is an excellent choice to be a part of my Canadian Pacific fleet. To add a little variety to the several cars I’ve collected, I’ve always been intending to take at least one car and backdate it to a late 1960s National Steel Car version of the same car. The NSC version is almost identical, having the same overall dimensions, number of side ribs, tie downs, etc., but has different ends and ladder arrangements. While the later HST/MIL cars have a distinctive ribbed end, the NSC car’s end is a solid, flat panel. Also, the NSC cars were built just before the introduction of CP Rail’s new “MultiMark” paint scheme, and were thus delivered in the older black paint. Interestingly, these cars were painted in simple block lettering, even though the Canadian Pacific script lettering was then the current lettering scheme in use at the time.

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CP 336702 at Guelph Junction, sometime in the 1990s. Jurgen Kleylein photo.

The first step was to disassemble the car and remove most of the little detail bits. Then I cut away the original end with a razor saw and cleaned things up with a file. The side extensions that cap off the horizontal end ribs were also cut back and the bottom rib, which is below the level of the interior floor on the model, was carved away and things filed smooth. Then a plate of .040″ thick styrene was installed in the opening to form the core of the new end. The surface of this plate needs to be flush with the rest of the cleaned up end for the rest of the project to work.

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With the core of the new end in place, I cut away the protruding tail ends of the top chords of the sides flush with the end plate, and started framing in the new end with a 2×6 top chord and 2×4 framing around the sides and bottom. (Actually in the photo below I goofed and used a 4×6 on the top chord, which roughly matched the thickness of the top chord on the sides, but checking the prototype photo above, you can see it’s not actually that prominent on the end and is a lot more flush, so I had to cut this away and replace it with thinner material.)

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The basic assembly of the end was then finished off by cutting and filing a rectangle of .010″ styrene to fit snugly inside the end framing. Ladders and other details still need to be re-added, but here you can see the assembled end compared to the original ExactRail end on the car to the left.

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We now interrupt your regularly scheduled programming…

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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.

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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!