CP 305513 Bulkhead Flatcar Kitbash

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 #14 – QGRY 80188

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This old QGRY (Quebec-Gatineau Railway) boxcar was originally built in 1964 by Hawker-Siddeley for Canadian Pacific and amazingly enough in 2004 still carries its original as-delivered paint job, when the majority of these cars were repainted CP Rail throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Photographed in the former ACR Steelton yard in August 2004, this car was probably loaded with pulp or paper from the pulp mill at Espanola on the Huron Central Railway (Huron Central and Quebec Gatineau are both subsidiaries of Genesee Rail One Canada), interchanged to CN to travel to destinations in the midwest United States.

Freight Car Friday #13 – CPAA 207289

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CP (ex-CPAA) 207289 50′ boxcar in the former ACR Steelton yard, August 19, 2004.

Most likely loaded with paper or woodpulp from the pulp mill at Espanola, interchanged to CN to head into the midwest United States, or possibly provided to the St. Marys Paper mill in Sault Ste. Marie.

Cars like this were previously also a common sight hauling baled pulp from mills on the north shore of Lake Superior south over the ACR from Franz.

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.

CP 48551 Completed

Today I received the last needed decals for the excess height markings for this car in the mail and finished off the last little details on this car. Just in time to deliver it to this weekend’s operating session at the model train club.

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This was kitbashed from an Intermountain 40′ boxcar, with the body cut and spliced to extend the height. One of the greatest advantages of the Intermountain kit for this job is that the roof, ends, body and doors are all separate pieces, and the ends, doors and roof on the prototype car all have their splices and extra material in different spots.

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The lettering and various markings was cobbled together from a mix of Microscale, Highball Graphics and CDS sets. Photos of prototype cars show quite a variety in the exact positioning of different pieces of the lettering, no two seems quite the same.

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This model is based on prototype photos of about 4 different cars in the CP 41000-41029 series (the above example courtesy Jurgen Kleylein), which was rebuilt in 1980, but I numbered it after a car in the small 3-car series 48550-48552 which existed in the mid 1970s and has the same reported dimensions and features. Unfortunately, I’ve not found any photos of any of these cars, so I’ve exercised a little modeller’s license and an educated guess that their appearance would be the same or at least similar.

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The extra-tall squished multimark was custom masked and painted to fit.