Getting close to the end....

[doctorwayne]

...of my supply of freight cars to build or re-build. I hope to move on to locomotives next, or perhaps cabooses, passenger cars, or even some work on the layout. First, though, the freight cars.

First up is this Tichy tank car. There are actually three of them, all bought recently and while building them, I decided to finish off the older "used" cars on the shelf, too.

Here's one of them, built with a few modifications - mostly metal grab irons and sill steps in place of the plastic ones which came with the kit.



...some strip styrene behind the sidesills provided extra drilling surface for the A-Line sill steps:



The first one is equipped with a 54" dome, and I used Black Cat decals to letter it for GATX. As an American car, its nominal capacity is 10,000 gallons:



Except for the 60" dome on this car, it is identical to the GATX car. However, as a Canadian-built car, its nominal capacity is 8,000 gallons (Imperial). Decals are again from Black Cat:



The third car, also Canadian-built, is identical to the BAOX car and was also lettered with Black Cat decals:



This boxcar, an old Front Range Products car, was picked-up "used" from the LHS. It was pretty-much as you see it here: built, but un-painted. I added metal grabs and sill steps, a new brake wheel, and some improved brake gear, plus the tack boards on the doors:



Since it seems very similar to the 1937 AAR steel boxcar, I modelled it as an almost-new car, with only minimal weathering. The John Galt Lines herald was supplied by my good friend Gary (jglfan), while all other lettering is from Champ:



This next car is by MDC, and was originally lettered for Great Northern. While it also had a pretty-decent weathering job, I have enough GN cars, so I decided to re-do it to match a photo in Ted Culotta's book on Essential Freight Cars. After stripping the paint, I cut away the deep side sills below the doors, then modified the fishbelly underframe's crossbearers to suit. All of the grab irons were shaved off and replaced with wire ones, although I omitted the second ones near the left end of the sides, as they would have been a late '30s or even later upgrade. The sill steps were also replaced with ones from A-Line, and new roofwalk corner grabs were fashioned from brass wire. This car is still being lettered, so only a photo of the car before painting at this time:




It seems that I've exceed my character limit for this post, so it will continue below.....

Wayne