27 cars - this alone is a train of near 6 meters! An nearby exorbitant long train for German raltions.
Very, very impressively!

Gary,

Nice to see you posting again, looks like youv'e been keeping busy, great looking cars.

Bruce

As my buddy Deano used to say, "Slap-awesome work, Gary!"

Wayne

Very convincing work

Thanks everyone for checking out the cars, and appreciate the compliments.

The Mountain King plant in real life has two unloading spurs, with 5 spots on each spur = 10 cars. I am modeling that as is, 10 unloading spots on the layout. The proto building is much longer than the unloading spurs though, it actually has 3 loading doors further down the spur. I did compress that a bit, with only two loading doors instead of the three.

As for the SLC train, it will typically have only 10 or less cars in it. Another 10 or less will already be spotted at Mountain King.... 20 or less SLC cars on the layout at any given time That leaves 7 more cars to mix things up a bit. For operations, a typical spud run will consist of dragging 10 loaded cars from the BNSF interchange to the plant, pulling the empties, then spotting the loads, then taking the empties back to the BNSF interchange for their return trip to Colorado.

Bruce, thanks for the warm welcome-back. I've been viewing Big Blue all this time, but have been hyper-focused on the layout construction = not much posting. I have an open house next weekend, have been getting ready for that.

WoW....27 reefers..?? I just finished 6 Athearn box cars which didn't need more than just some light weathering on cars and trucks, and slapping them together. I nearly went nuts..!!! 27...Geezzzz....

Terrific job..!!

Great looking cars Gary.
I was wondering where your post was so I searched your name and found this thread. If in fact the posts are new today they didn't show up as new posts nor active topics for me so I'm sorry I didn't reply sooner.
You put lots of work into these cars and deserve all the kudos you can get.
Charlie

Excellent work, Gary,
In what period were these cars used ?

As Gary has modeled them they are in current use. The originals were probably built in the late 1950's to mid 1960's if I remember correctly. The Santa Fe ran them for close to 40 years and then after the merger with BN they rebuilt 300 cars for test purposes to check the feasibility of using truck trailer refrigeration units on rail cars in order to test possible fuel savings using auto start stop technology. They rebuilt 100 cars with rebuilt original style Trane refrigeration units with gen sets, 100 cars with Thermo-King refrigeration units and 100 cars with Carrier-Transicold units. The U.P. also rebuilt a bunch of ex-PFE cars with Carrier-Transicold units, I'm not sure if they did the T-K's or the original style. The cars are the prototypes for the ARMN cars offered by Intermountain.

Russ Bellinis Wrote:... They rebuilt 100 cars with rebuilt original style Trane refrigeration units with gen sets, 100 cars with Thermo-King refrigeration units and 100 cars with Carrier-Transicold units.....

Russ, do you know the outcome of the test and if further/later build reefers got the "winning" refrigeration units?

The 64 foot Trinity reefer now built by both Exact Rail and BLM for the Union Pacific was done as a result of favorable tests on the rebuilt units. The large 91 foot white with blue lettering BNSF reefers are the result of their favorable test. BNSF had so much trouble with Thermo-King mechanics just going to sidings to work on cars without setting out proper blue flags or even notifying BNSF that they were on site that BNSF took the T-K's off all 100 test cars and installed Carrier units and also sent T-K a letter to forward to all of their dealers telling them that due to the frequent and constant violations of Blue Flag safety laws, no T-K mechanic was to be permitted on BNSF company property from that time forward until further notice, and that any T-K mechanic caught on BNSF property would be arrested and prosecuted for trespassing! The Thermo-King units are still found on trailers and containers used in TOFC or COFC service, but I don't think any are installed on rail cars any more.

Wow, Awesome work! I wish I noticed this thread earlier, we have a whole diesel gen-set from a reefer like this in my shop, I might have been able to take a few photos of it to help you out.

I wish I had the patience to mass produce. I feel like i get "repetitive motion burn-out" after I do the same tasks over and over again. How do you beat that?

Thanks again to everyone for all the compliments. Also, thanks to Russ for filling in all the info on these cars. They are indeed still in use, I see a number of them in the yard on Mykawa Street every day on my commute. There seems to be a constant flow of potatos from Colorado to Houston.

GEC, I have a tv and a computer at my workbench - that helps to break up the monotony. Also, my enthusiasm for the project kept pushing me. To accurately model the Mountain King unloading facility and cars was my motivation. A rough guess is that I spent about 90 hours on the 27 cars, so a bit over 3 hours per car. The 10 ex-Milwaukee Road cars were weathered last, I admit it was becoming tedious. I persisted, knowing that the outcome would be the reward.

I very much enjoyed this thead. Although the cars may not be exact replicas, they look the part, are a bit different and have a very consistant finish. Great
They really achieve the same effect you get when looking at a real rake of similar cars, at first they all look the same, then you start noticing the differences and then you realise that they are all actually unique.

TT, thanks for the kind comments and for your interest in the cars. It is gratifying to see a nice string of these cars being switched out at the potato factory during an ops session.

You've probably seen it, but there is another thread concerning these same prototype cars being switched out in real life:

http://www.the-gauge.net/forum/viewtopic...=54&t=3747