Eric Mumper joins the RCW bloggers with an upgrade on an HO scale brass covered hopper.
The Owens-Illinois Duraglas covered hopper cars have been a bit of a fascination of mine for many years. My layout has the Streator, Illinois, bottle plant as an industry and Chet French found many of these cars coming in on the Wabash hauling soda. Where they were loaded would be great to find out.
Clark Propst has offered some different ideas on prototype freight car modeling. Here’s what it looks like from his point of view.
The way I go about choosing my freight car fleet could be best described as “Backwards modeling”. What is “Backwards modeling”? It starts with a Prototype designed layout with representatives of actual customers in correct locations. These customers are researched to find the type of materials they shipped and/or received. Real railroad documents are combed through to find freight cars that carried those loads. Once a list of likely candidates is compiled, the search is on for information about the freight cars and how they be modeled. When the freight car model is completed it will then bring or take a specific commodity from a customer.
If we model freight cars, we usually need a caboose at some point. George Toman shares tips and techniques to build a classic Milwaukee Road caboose.
This Milwaukee Road caboose project started out simple. I just wanted to take it out of the box and weather it up. As I researched photos I discovered that the Walthers Model was inaccurate for a 1939 version and decided to upgrade the model to reflect a 1944 version of a shop built Milwaukee Road rib side caboose.
Frank Hodina shares another tank car modeling incident. Here’s his story.
My wife is always telling me I can’t leave anything alone. I fiddle and change whatever I’m working on. Building a freight car kit straight out of the box, that just doesn’t happen. The same goes for the models that we produce at Resin Car Works.