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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!