Sunday foto fun 1/31/2021

[TBird1958]

 Been awhile since I started one of these.......

A simple project that I finished up this week, I had previously weathered this Wheels of Time car, the load came from parts I can no longer remember, I've had it for a long time and have been meaning to do a little work on it to bring it up a bit. I washed it with some thinned out Ochre oil paint  followed by some Raw Sienna to relieve the bland overall look of the load. A little dunnage helps break up the obvious symmetry as well.

Here SP 509090 built by Gunderson Bros. Engineering Co. 1966 is eastbound on the D&RGW sometime in the mid '70s when massive amounts of lumber from the west coast were shipped across the country. Even with the majority of the SP's traffic going to the U.P. at Ogden, UT the Grande still moved a lot of lumber traffic east with over tonnage trains dropping cars at Provo UT for under weight trains to pick up as head end "fill". By this point the railroad was trying to standardize on 5 unit sets of EMD Geeps as  power, deemed the economic way to keep the railroad fluid. 
 Finally, just a quick note of the photography, I'm using an iPhone and a single PAR 30 3000K LED NFL to light this, along with some additional "fill" priovided by my basement lights.

Have a great Sunday,
Mark Hills

     

[tom]

Since Walthers is releasing a Penn Central Phase II GP9s in their Proto line I took another photo of my Walthers GP9 that I completed last year. Mine started with an undec Phase I version that I changed the louver locations to make it into a Phase II. I really like these GP9s.

[timvanmersbergen]

I've been working on scenery on the Dubuque side of the river around the Shot Tower and Millwork District.






Tim VanMersbergen

[fr8kar]

Thanks to a tip from thunderhawk, I was able to realize a dream I've had for many years: metal floors for my Walthers Thrall LO-PAC II well cars. These older kits come with a molded plastic body and floor with the openings in floor modeled correctly and a recess is molded into the car bottom for a solid sheet steel weight. The weight is painted black, which maintains some illusion of shadow contrasting with the floor painted the body color, but on the prototype the rails below can be plainly seen through the openings in the floor.

I made two drawings of the floor: one of the floor bottom and one without holes for the container pins and with slightly larger openings in the floor. Laminating the two different sheets gives me a heavier floor while maintaining the thin sheet metal appearance of the prototype.

These cars came out around the same time as the Athearn Maxi-III cars, so there hadn't been much of a standard established for the container pins. I'm not sure if you could even say today that a standard has been established, but current Walthers containers have a smaller pin at each corner than the original containers from the 90s did and the shape is different. Over the years I've settled on the pin size and spacing established by Athearn with their original blue box containers since I already have so many. For this reason it was imperative that the container pin openings in the Walthers floor be redesigned to accommodate the Athearn pin setup, ergo the pin openings have a rugby-ball shape compared to the oval shape on the original floor.









I still have to install the wedge-shaped guides in the small rectangular openings in the floor and of course paint the floors to match. Besides this four-unit car, I also have two more five-unit articulated cars of this type to convert, including one that must have the end wells shortened to 40' openings. I was a little concerned about how to do that prior to receiving these laser-cut parts but now I think it will be a piece of cake.

[Donnell Wells]

Ryan, your ingenuity is outstanding! Well done man!

Donnell

[sd50f]

Okay, I want some of those well car floors.

Timothy Dineen

[Funnelfan]

Do you plan to run these wells empty on a regular basis??? I can see going to all this trouble for empty wells or wells with tank containers, but not if you run them loaded all the time. I'm also thinking without the solid weight, the wells might be getting awfully light to run empty. How does the new floor compare to the old floor and weight?

[Funnelfan]

Some trackside details I made for the club layout.

[thunderhawk]

Jan 31, 2021 11:53:29 GMT -8 fr8kar said:

Thanks to a tip from thunderhawk, I was able to realize a dream I've had for many years: metal floors for my Walthers Thrall LO-PAC II well cars. These older kits come with a molded plastic body and floor with the openings in floor modeled correctly and a recess is molded into the car bottom for a solid sheet steel weight. The weight is painted black, which maintains some illusion of shadow contrasting with the floor painted the body color, but on the prototype the rails below can be plainly seen through the openings in the floor.

I made two drawings of the floor: one of the floor bottom and one without holes for the container pins and with slightly larger openings in the floor. Laminating the two different sheets gives me a heavier floor while maintaining the thin sheet metal appearance of the prototype.

These cars came out around the same time as the Athearn Maxi-III cars, so there hadn't been much of a standard established for the container pins. I'm not sure if you could even say today that a standard has been established, but current Walthers containers have a smaller pin at each corner than the original containers from the 90s did and the shape is different. Over the years I've settled on the pin size and spacing established by Athearn with their original blue box containers since I already have so many. For this reason it was imperative that the container pin openings in the Walthers floor be redesigned to accommodate the Athearn pin setup, ergo the pin openings have a rugby-ball shape compared to the oval shape on the original floor.









I still have to install the wedge-shaped guides in the small rectangular openings in the floor and of course paint the floors to match. Besides this four-unit car, I also have two more five-unit articulated cars of this type to convert, including one that must have the end wells shortened to 40' openings. I was a little concerned about how to do that prior to receiving these laser-cut parts but now I think it will be a piece of cake.

That worked out very well. And good thinking on the layering to maintain the illusion of a thinner piece. Looks excellent while still gaining a decent amount of weight.

[fr8kar]

Jan 31, 2021 13:57:10 GMT -8 Funnelfan said:

Do you plan to run these wells empty on a regular basis??? I can see going to all this trouble for empty wells or wells with tank containers, but not if you run them loaded all the time. I'm also thinking without the solid weight, the wells might be getting awfully light to run empty. How does the new floor compare to the old floor and weight?

Obviously it's not as heavy as the solid weight, but it's much better than no weight at all. My old postal scale died on me, so I can't weigh them to compare. And now that I think about it, I've already converted all the units of the four-unit car so I couldn't do an apples-to-apples comparison anyway.

Back when these cars came out there was a debate on whether to install the weight at all. In Dave Bontrager's article on these in the January 1994 Model Railroading he left the weights off and after tightening a troublesome truck encountered no problems operating the cars once metal wheels has been installed. I've run them without weights installed and had no issues, so I expect these cars will be fine.

If needed, there's actually some room under the bottom layer to add a duplicate of the bottom layer to increase the weight even more. At that point the weight would begin to show from the side of the car, but that was a problem with the original design anyway.

I doubt I'll be running any baretables, but I do enjoy tank containers so I can envision those being frequent riders in these cars.

[riogrande]

I have a couple sets of those kit built 5-unit well car sets. I had thought of doing something to allow the holes to be open but never did and didn't figure I would ever run them without containers.

[simulatortrain]

This week I detailed this Atlas pulpwood flat and made a load for it.

[kentuckysouthernrwy]

Jan 31, 2021 18:56:05 GMT -8 simulatortrain said:

This week I detailed this Atlas pulpwood flat and made a load for it.

Sure looks better than Atlas’ plastic load. Monster logs.

[edgecrusher]

Its been a long while but I've finally finished something.  Its the rest of the boxcar that goes with the frame from this thread. committing-ultimate-coupler-sin

Its a Kadee kit car with the minor additions of a defect card holder and different end walkways to match the prototype.  It took three decals sets to get everything I needed, the bulk being Mask Island.

I model the late 60s so it isn't too messed up having been built in 66.  Thanks for looking.