AT&SF 31564 Box Car

This PS-1 box car was known on the AT&ST as a BX-57. However, for freight car aficionados one should note that the BX57 class should have a Gypsum running board that was unpainted galvanised steel. This is a Plano replacement etch I plan to use to replace the running board. I'm a bit surprised that Kadee haven't produced this variant of the running boards for their models, as I can't imagine that they haven't made back their investment costs yet?

In general any PS-1 box cars running in the late 1950s should have their tack boards placed in the lower position, since by the time they were built the trend was towards lower boards that train crew could reach from the ground. I suppose I could change this, which in this case would mean getting replacement doors, not sure I can be bothered?

All the bits cut out, with the running board applied using canopy glue.

Just showing the lateral running boards in the process of being applied. You can just see at the right hand edge the replacement etch at the brake wheel has also been applied. To finish off I retrieved the lateral running board grab rails from the Kadee moulding and glued them on using canopy cement.

All I have to do now is send this car off to the weathering shop.

American Freight Cars 4: Yet More Additions

Some more freight cars for my fleet, which represent the final push to get enough cars for operational variety, so I'm not expecting to add many more RTR models from now on; apart from the odd shiny new thing that catches this girl's eye. :-)

First up a brace of Atlas ACF ICC-105 11,000 gallon tank car, which I've just discovered may be too modern for my layouts period?

However, they do look nice, but further research as to their provenance is needed. I quite like tank cars and if truth be told I probably didn't need these, but they were shiny and I couldn't resist their siren call.

I found out that this model from Red Caboose of an SP prototype that was also made by ACF for the C&EI, and as I needed cars from this railroad I bought one.

For pretty much the same set of reasons I saw this Kadee PS-1 50 foot double door box car that I thought looked really shiny, so I snapped it up. I only need one more C&EI car for my roster, which in practical terms means I can stop looking for anymore cars from this railroad.

This another InterMountain AAR 1937 car in a livery that I needed for my representational need to have a typical selection box cars from those railroads whose cars would appear on my layout. Can't just have PS-1s roving the layout like herds of wildebeest on the plains of the Serengeti.

The New York Central System was the first North American railroad that I modelled seriously, for definitions of serious that allow for youthful indiscretions arising from ignorance of the subject matter. I fell in love with NYC Hudsons and the 20th Century Ltd, which captured my imagination from the romantic notion of "Centuries that pass in the night". Anyway, this is a rather nice InterMountain model.

Finally, this time round, an InterMountain Tichy Group hopper. I like the paneling variation of this car, which adds a bit of variety to my hopper fleet.

Thirteen Back Up

Saturday saw us down in Chatham, Kent, which is a 140 mile round journey for us, so not a show we go to often, but well worth the time it took. The Chatham show takes place in the historic dockyards, based in one of the sheds on the quay. Being semi-open to the elements it can be a bit cold, if the weather is inclement, which it was on Saturday. At least one trader was complaining of being cold.

Saw a lot of very nice layouts with a wide selection of scales with a good mix of British, American and European models. The latter often being visitors from abroad, which is quite common to the Chatham show. Bought a building kit, and was bought an NCE Power Cab by my partner, to replace my old Lenz Digital Plus, which was a bit basic for my needs.

Sunday we went to a BBQ, so didn't get much modelling done.

However, I did finally get my back order of wheels from Caboose Hobbies at the weekend. I have been spending sometime sorting out all the axles by length, before mounting them in the trucks of my freight cars that have been so long sans wheels.

L&N 7438 Gondola: Part 1

My Intermountain USRA L&N composite gondola build. Here is the basic gondola as I found it after taking out of storage.

Since then I have managed to complete the undersides by adding the brake rigging as can be seen here.

However, in the process I broke a stirrup step, which I've reinforced with microstrip as the initial repair didn't hold up to being looked at hard. I'm really looking at that over scale width coupler box. I shall have to see if it needs trimming to allow this car to negotiate the ridiculously tight curves I run on my traction layout?

And here is an end view with the first three of the 26 grab irons that have to be applied to finish the model. These are a bit of a fag to do, being the very epitome of tedious repetition. Also, I think that they would be better if they were metal.

Next I have to move on to finishing of applying all of the grab irons...

Milwaukee 18590 Box Car Weathered

As per usual I started with an application on Games Workshop washes to grimy up the model.

Once this was done I then used car screen wash, from undiluted out the bottle, to quite diluted, to wash the model clean.

NYC 867399 Hopper Weathered

The Kadee hoppers are beautiful models, but  their weight is made up by the load, and therefore if you want to run them empty they are a bit too light to run reliably.

So I poured liquid lead into all the available space I could in the underframe, which helped to bring the model up to a light, but usable running weight. Adding the coal load brings the car up to the full recommend NMRA weight. Once I'd done this I ran the car through the weathering shop, trying out some different techniques I remembered from the past.

I have previously documented the interior weathering in a previous post. 

And all I had to do was finish off that like so.

Well I think this looks suitably distressed now, and having modified the coal load placement height and adding real coal I think this looks pretty sharp too.

Five Down, Thirteen to Go

A parcel arrived from Caboose Hobbies arrived yesterday. Opened it up to find some Reboxx wheels and ExactRail S2 Barber trucks, which is all well and good. Unfortunately, only a partial order of the wheels with only one packet of 1.030 axles in the parcel. However, I broke them out and immediately sorted them out by length; as they vary across a range of 1.026 to 1.029, so I can have matching length axles in my trucks.

As a result of my efforts I was able to get five cars back onto the layout. As you can see hovering above are my Suydam CNS&M passenger cars, still waiting for Bill to get back to me with the power truck solution.

Included is my caboose with PSC leaf springs in Kadee archbar trucks, and that I have started weathering it too. Got to blacken those leaf springs.

B&O 381132 Box Car Weathered

One of the good things about taking photographs of your models is that it gives you a fresh perspective on what you have done. Useful when weathering cars as it enables one to finesse the end results. I quite like the way this car has turned out. However, its sister, a Milwaukee horizontal rib box car I was working on at the same time, has gone back to the bench for some further work.

SCCX 1492 Tank Car Weathered

Before...


And after. First of my tank cars that I've weathered.

The process was one of applying washed, Games Workshop inks, and then washing off the excess using windscreen wash. After that I dusted with powder pigments and then drybrushed the trucks and couplers.

Misery

Is having a load of freight cars without wheels. Those wheels have been ordered, but have not yet arrived, and only a partial order is coming with a large number of wheels on back order.

You are walking down a road and you see a turtle on its back... to misquote one of my favourite movie's.

Shake, Rattle & Roll

I am probably one of the few people who is really bugged by axle slop in freight car trucks. I say this, because as far as I can see no one else seems to think it is a problem. The nearest I see to anything about axle lengths is some of the guides one can download so one can order replacement wheelsets with the right axle length by manufacturers like Reboxx and NWSL.

I have been replacing wheels in my trucks since the get-go, which for me was 14 years ago when I started my P&SR project that I abandoned. Back then, and up until a short time ago (last couple of weeks) I've been happy enough to follow the published advice. Until that is I discovered a problem.

Shake, rattle and roll.

Go and pick up a truck, any truck by your favourite manufacturer and shake it. Can you here it rattle? From what I've read the received wisdom on the model railroading sites is that a little slop is good as the trucks roll further when sloppy.

Uhm..., while this may, or may not be true, what is certainly true is that pinpoint bearings are not designed to have pinpoint axles slop around in them willy-nilly. So I've been experimenting, and the way I did this was to order a bunch of Reboxx wheelsets from Caboose Hobbies.

First off, may I just say how nice the Reboxx wheels look, which is my positive thing to say about the product. However, the sizes specified when buying said wheelsets are  less than ideal, because it became clear after measuring that the specified size was an indicator of the maximum length of the axle; not the size of the axle that one is going to get.

Okay, caveat, no manufacturer can supply perfect sized parts, due to manufacturing tolerances that inevitably arise as a part is being made. However, saying that one can expect that all the parts marketed as being to a specification will be within a few thousands of an inch. So then the question is how large is a few thousands of an inch?

Good question, so I look around at other bespoke model railway manufacturers and measured the lengths of their axles. I chose Exactoscale and found that all their axles were within a plus or minus range of two thou. So, for example about a dozen axles were  length X, and about four were two thou shorter, and about another four were two thou longer. Length X is irrelevant, as axle lengths are different for American versus British practice. This seems like a good spread, as the majority are al one length, and consistency is what one wants.

Good new is that Reboxx axles are more consistent than the NWSL wheelsets I had, having less outliers. Bad news is that the axles were all under size, just the same as the NWSL axles I have. So if you really want 1.015 axle for example, then buying the packet marked 1.015 will, I'm afraid to say, lead to disappointment. Furthermore, the replacement sizes recommended are less than ideal, since they do not address the main problem from the experiment of shaking the trucks to see if they rattle, and then checking to see how they roll?

Having bought a packet of each size of axle I thought I needed, or two in a couple of cases,  and having taken all the wheelsets out of all my freight car trucks, and measuring the axle lengths, I was able to do some experimentation.

Using a Kadee ASF Ride Control truck I changed out the 1.015 axles, which were in fact less than 1.015, and by trial and error fitted replacement wheelsets to fit;  until I had no rattle when shaking the truck, but still had a truck that would roll freely. What I found was that Reboxx 1.027 axles worked best in the Kadee ASF truck. Hopefully, this means that all the Kadee trucks that are stated as needing 1.015 axles will actually run with 1.027 axles (Andrews, Barber, PRR 2DF8 and Vulcan are said to all be 1.015 like the ASF Ride Control's).

Next I took the axles out of my ExactRail Barber S2 trucks and repeated the process. The original axles varied from 1.003 to 1.005, and I found that they would run with 1.012 axles.

Result is that I now have five freight cars on my layout with wheelsets that have axles long enough so that the trucks don't rattle when shaken, but the cars roll nice and freely. I also have a fifteen boxes of axles all sorted by length that by-and-large are of no use to me.

Plan B now involves selling all the axles I have and replacing them with ones that are longer.

Addendum: A big shout out and thank you to both Susan Parker of CLAG, and David Fouracre of The Tool Box for their considered input into this piece.
  

American Freight Cars 3: Further Additions

Another batch of new cars through the company photography shops. I will of course refer you all back to the a previous post on the roster I'm trying to build.



So no prizes for guessing that I need lots of Milwaukee cars for the layout. They pretty much represent my home road by proxy, or at least according to the numbers I counted when looking at pictures of North Shore Line freight trains. So this is the second of thirteen Milwaukee freight cars I need, joining my ExactRail horizontal rib box car.



I was lucky to get these two Kadee hoppers from Amherst Depot, as they are out of production. Good service from them too. Four down, only another nine Milwaukee freight cars to get.

Next up on my list of needs are lots of NYC freight cars, which is nice, because the NYC was the first railroad I ever chose to model. Got to love those Hudsons, Mohawks & Niagaras.  Here though is another Kadee coal hopper to join my NYC PS-1 box car I already have.



This is Broadway Limited model of the NYC 486 series steel box cars with 7/8 corrugated ends in post 55 Gothic livery. A signature car and loads were made. It has distinctive end grabs rather than a ladder for accessing the running boards. Trucks look nice, but have a unique way of fixing to the underframe, which is going to make replacing them slightly onerous.



An InterMountain 1937 10 panel AAR box car in the NYC pre-55 livery. So now I only need another six NYC cars for the roster.

The B&O was one of the top six or so class one railroads in the period I am modelling. So I need four cars. This Tichy USRA 2-Bay hopper joins my ExactRail M-53 Wagontop boxcar to bring me up to half the number of B&O cars I need.

This model was a bit lighter than its sister below. This turned out to be due to an assembly error at the factory that had led to one of the weight being missing. After using liquid lead it now weighs a fraction more than its sister.

This IC car is another Tichy USRA 2-Bay hopper from InterMountain, and it is the first of four IC railroad freight cars I need.

This is an Atlas 1932 ARA box car. Doesn't really fit the roster, but I just liked the look of it, and I desperately needed to and some variety to my collection of post war PS-1 box cars. Interesting Dalhman trucks too.



This is the only D&H freight car I need for the layout. The Kadee PS-3 hoppers are very sharp models, but are a bit light without the coal load that Kadee use to bring the weight up to NMRA standards.

Another Kadee hopper car. I need four GM&O freight cars, one of which needs to be a hopper. Nice model, but I don't like the way Kadee have done the weights, and the loads are a bit sub-standard for my tastes, and I will use real coal glued on top to improve the look.

An InterMountain 1937 10 panel AAR box car in NP livery. Not on the roster, but I found a couple of shots where once you knew what you were looking at, it was obvious that it was a NP box car, so I had to have a freight car in this livery.

I guess I need to revise my roster numbers now I'm better able to identify freight cars from fuzzy photographs based on the knowledge of the liveries I've been researching?

This is a rather sharp Atlas 70 ton Hart ballast hopper. I'd like to get another in Milwaukee livery, but guess what? They are out of production at this time. Anyway, I need four CB&Q freight cars, so this is the first of them. I suspect that the livery on this car is too modern for my 1959 layout. No doubt someone will tell me at some point.
 

UP 190690 Box Car: ACR Project

This Maerklin/Trix UP box car was bought for one reason only, it has Alternate Center Rivets, and apart from resin kits I believe this is the only plastic model of a car with this arrangement? Anyway this is a B-50-24/27 a 1937 AAR variant, which due to the steel used required an extra line of rivets between the panels. In other words a true rivet counters delight.

Mike Brock, owner of the Steam Era Freight Car list, and all round UP guru has given the models a qualified thumbs up. Main issues are the trucks and couplers. It also needs coupler cut levers and air hoses. The roof pattern is not quite right, but noted as something that one will need to decide what they want to do?

It would be a lot of effort to cut the roof off and replace it. A non-trivial job, but who am I to speak as I've already turned a perfectly acceptable War Emergency gondola from Tichy into effectively a kit, so we shall see how I feel when the time comes for this car to enter the work bench.

I shall have to find some photographs and come to my own conclusions. I understand that there is an article by Richard Hendrickson on Union Pacific B-50-24 and B-50-27 Class Steel Box Cars using the Marklin models,  in The Streamliner. Vol. 17 No. 1 (Winter 2003), which I shall try to get hold of.

Finally, many thanks to Barry Bennett for pointing me in the right direction for getting hold of one of these cars at a reasonable price. Thank you.

N&W 44324 Box Car: Part 2 Saving the Day

Well I didn't record all the individual steps, but here is the final few steps to reach an end finish I was happy with.

I got the model back to this state, which is sans egregious brush strokes. And here is a three-quarter view to show the roof.

Roof still wasn't right, even after highlighting the panels as can be seen here.

Anyway I took the car the spray shop and applied some new Modelmates weathering dye over the finished model and then refinished the model. This experiment has given me an idea for doing a car using these weathering dyes as the basis for finishing my next box car.

In the process this blemishing appeared on the roof, which was rather surprising, but serendipitously there was a nice weathering article in the April issue of Model RailRoader, by Charlie Duckworth, which showed him doing something similar to represent weathered galvanised steel roofs on box cars. I think a woot for the win is called for here. 

The April Model RailRoader issue also has a nice one page piece on Hayes bumping posts too, which is going to come in handy when I get around to weathering my Walthers plastic Hayes bumping posts.

  

  

PRR 363156 Gondola: Part 2 Lumpen Lead

I made a mould for casting the lead weight. It didn't go as expected.

Rather a misshapen lump.

 

Doh, one of those I've forgot to add those trucks to my weight calculation again.

I shall have to rethink how to make the moulded weight, but in principle I think I'm on the right route for project.

  

Interior Group Weathering

Its been one of those days today. Not feeling well, getting over yet another winter bug has made me feel exhausted. Had to go to the bank today, after having a bath in the morning and ate out for lunch, followed by a nap to recover from all this excitement and carrying a small amount of groceries home.

So I thought to myself what can I do to at least feel that today has been a little bit productive?



So I decided to rust up the interiors of eight hoppers and one mill gondola.

I used Scenic Rust, which is iron filings/dust with what appears to be Matte medium and Gun blue. The process is to mix the iron filings with the matte medium and paint onto the surface to be treated, Allow to dry, and then brush on Gun Blue, which then rusts the iron coating. Quite ingenious.

I then worked over some Kadee hopper coal loads using Matte medium to fix some real coal to the top of the plastic mouldings.

The Kadee hopper loads are designed with integral weights that are ingeniously suspended from the coal moulding. Unfortunately, in my mind, this means that if you remove the load you lose the weight, and the cars are ridiculously light. I want to run empty hoppers so I've been weighing up all my hoppers using liquid lead over the past few weeks.

So, now the loads can be a lot lighter, but I do add about an ounce of steel weight to the bottom of the moulded coal load so that they run when full at the recommended weight, and to allow me to use magnet to remove the load from the car.

And here are five loads, two I did earlier, as they say on Blue Peter, and three drying out.