Dr. Wayne, I plan to build a fleet of "door and a half" Wood-sided, steel underframe/end boxcars, and was wondering which car would be an ideal starting point for such a conversion? A friend suggested the Tichy USRA rebuild model, but do you have any other suggestions too?

How should I approach the half-sized (4' usually) door? I know you've made a number of these, and I'd love to see what you can dig up.

Thanks!

Hi Miles, and my apologies for not noticing this sooner.

For my door-and-a-half cars of that type, I used Accurail's 9-panel single sheathed boxcars. They're cheaper than the Tichy (which is a very nice model itself), and if you don't want the fishbelly underframe, it's easy to replace the Accurail parts with scratchbuilt ones made from various sizes of strip styrene. For the half-door, New England Rail Services offers a kit made specifically for the Accurail car: it's part of their Standard Car Company line.


Include with the kit are two pairs of half-doors, one with the mid-mounted reinforcement strip to match the Accurail car's existing doors (as shown above), and another with a high reinforcement strip, along with a pair of the strips only - these are for use if you wish to remove the strips from the Accurail doors, as they're actually incorrectly placed, then replace them, in their proper position, using the extra parts.
Here's a modified car with the higher stiffener strips:


You also get the necessary upper door tracks, bottom door guides and hardware, and some triangular braces that were used on some cars. With a little improvisation, you can do two cars with one conversion kit.
The modifications are most easily done on an undecorated car (readily available) and require only an X-Acto knife, a #75 drill bit and pin vise, and some solvent cement.

You could also use Tichy's standard #3017 wood door, although you'd need to section it to make it narrower and then shave off all of the latch hardware and somehow replicate it on the proper side.

For other types of cars, you can add half-doors simply by using similar doors, sectioning them down to the proper width and then adding the appropriate hardware. The Athearn doors from their 50' doubledoor automobile boxcar are particularly useful, as two of the four doors already have the latch hardware on the proper side.

Here's a Train Miniature door-and-a-half car: in addition to the sectioned half-door, both doors had to be increased in height, easily done by sectioning spare doors horizontally, then re-combining them:


A Train Miniature car done with modified Red Caboose doors:


...and a double door PRR X-28 boxcar, using shortened Athearn automobile boxcar doors:


Wayne

Thanks a ton Wayne, I knew you hadn't any shortage of ideas or techniques to share on this subject. I'll check out the NERS conversions and play around with some of the extra boxcar doors I have and see what happens! I'll post progress photos as they go along with the conversion.

great looking cars, Wayne. When time and money permit, I want to assemble a fleet of cars for my era (1910-1920). Pre-USRA may present a challenge. I assume I will be needing mostly truss rod cars, and the HO market for those is significantly smaller.

Thanks, Kevin.
Model Die Casting has a selection of earlier cars, mostly 36-footers and most with truss rods. The latest versions of the same cars from Horizon are r-t-r and have, I think, metal wheels. They also have much better paint and lettering, although all of this comes at a price. I believe that they have boxcars, reefers, and stock cars, all with truss rods, and a shorty (30'-er?)flatcar, 40' gondola, and an old-style tankcar, all with steel underframes. Atlas also has a nice r-t-r 36' reefer with truss rods.
The car below, an MDC reefer when I bought off the "used" table at the LHS it for a buck-or-so, did have truss rods, but I removed them, adding a fishbelly underframe. I also removed the reefer door hardware, then covered-over the area with a wooden door from an old Train Miniature car. Wire grabs replaced the cast-on ones, then the car was placed in MoW service.


Another car suitable for your era is the 36' Fowler Patent boxcar, made originally by LifeLike Canada as part of their Proto1000 line. I don't know if Walthers offers this car nowadays, but it's a very nice version of the prototype, which was the forerunner of all single sheathed boxcars in North America. The model comes with free-standing plastic grab irons (I replaced mine with metal ones) and the proper Simplex trucks. The real ones were built from 1908 to 1915 and remained in service, in some cases, beyond the end of steam. Also r-t-r, they were pretty pricey at just under $40.00, although you can occasionally find them much cheaper, and, as with the others mentioned, don't overlook used ones.


Other suitable cars for your era could be the old Train Miniature cars, some of which are offered by Walthers. Useful ones would be the NYC-designed all-steel boxcars, which first appeared, I believe, in the mid-teens. They were the forerunner of the later ARA recommended design for steel cars:


...and the single sheathed design, also from the same timeframe:


You should be able to include a few of the USRA designs too, especially the single sheathed style shown at the start of this thread and the USRA doublesheathed car:


Wayne

Wayne, I love those cars.

But.....

I can feel myself being drawn to replacing the molded on grab irons on all my cars. Yours look terrific, and it definitely adds to the realism. Especially on the DSS&A car. Did you add bolts/washers to those?

.... must resist. No! I don't have time to do that right now! NOOOOO!

Thanks, Gary. The n/b/w detail is from the cast-on grabs that were on the car. I simply shaved off the grabiron part, using a modified X-Acto #17 chisel blade, re-scored the board detail with a #11 blade (one pass with the cutting edge, one pass with the back of the blade) then drilled for the wire grabirons. The car was an unpainted one, so no issue with matching the factory paint. You can't see it in that photo, but I didn't bother with the grabs on the car's ends, and usually don't. The one below is an exception, one of three highly modified Train Miniature cars which got re-built sides, new underframes, ends, doors, and roofwalks, along with the full grabiron treatment:


I was looking for a picture of a car like the DSS&A car, but with factory paint, but can't seem to locate one. Anyway, the procedure is the same as for the unpainted car, then, after the grabs have been installed, I brush paint them, and also touch-up the areas where the grabs were removed. Often, I use the same paint to randomly re-coat various boards or groups of boards along the car's length - boards were routinely replaced when damaged and usually only the new boards got new paint. After any necessary modifications have been done to the lettering, I then use my airbrush to weather the cars in the usual manner. This doesn't hide the touch-ups completely, but it does help to make them look as if they really belong there.

Wayne

Thanks for the detailed info, Wayne. As usual, your modeling looks terrific and your explanations are thorough. I can't get enough of your work. BTW, how many boxcars do you have?

Gary S Wrote:Thanks for the detailed info, Wayne. As usual, your modeling looks terrific and your explanations are thorough. I can't get enough of your work. BTW, how many boxcars do you have?

I'll second your comments Gary. When the time comes, I'd like to scratch build a small batch of 40' Fowler boxcars for my RR. I just love the look of them. I find these threads immensely helpful.

Hi Miles---here's another car for your consideration but it might be difficult to find one.It's a Juneco kit that I picked up at a train show many years ago

Incredible pictures and details as always, guys. Stuff likes this makes me wish I could switch to HO, because this level of detail would be extremely difficult in N scale. Most impressive!

CNNutbar, would you believe I have that kit lying around? It's a nice car, surely and yours is built very well.