In April 2020, I posted this photo of a Funaro & Camerlengo CNR Reefer kit I had built.
I had bought two of those kits but I have only build one. The second kit was put on a shelf waiting for the moment I would be willing to deal with such a kit having so many small details.
Since then I was lucky to buy three more kits on eBay and Facebook. So I had not one but four kits to build. Two have hinged doors and Dreadnought ends, two have plug doors and NCS ends but construction is pretty much the same except for some details.
This time I decided to build them together, one step at a time. Each step will take four more time to be completed but no kit will be left on a shelf.
I started the project a few weeks ago. Here is the first step : Cleaning the parts and putting each kit in its own tray.
I just found this in a hobby shop yesterday for a very good price. However ALWAYS check the contents of the box:
Totally wrong era. Argh!
Fortunately, after checking my decal stash:
I can backdate it to my era of late fifties/early sixties.
My plan is to weather it very dirty and press it into tie hauling service.
It's soaking in a bath of 90% isopropyl alcohol right now.
They are rebuilding the railway bridge in downtown Guelph. I'm not sure what the full project is, but they started by replacing some girders at the east end over Elizabeth St.
The bridge looks designed to support double track but only completed for single. I think Go Transit is going to double track the line. The streets in the area are being closed on weekends for work. This is right beside where 6167 is displayed.
So I figured I'd kick things off with two projects that I picked up via the Friends of the East Broad Top Company Store, an unpowered HOn3 model of the East Broad Top's unique M-3 track inspection motorcar, as well as a resin kit of the East Broad Top's sole surviving tank car. I'm gonna start off with a brief bit of history about both, as well as photos of the projects as they were received. I have a couple of photos of the prototypes that I found on the internet that I plan to post up (with photo credits if they are available). If that's a problem they can be removed or whatever, but I thought having a prototype photo might be helpful for those less familiar.
So, the East Broad Top M-3 was built in 1928 by the EBT Shops in Rockhill Furnace, PA. It was built from a Nash automobile and used as a track inspection car and occasionally used for MOW service. It is a gas-mechanical vehicle and reportedly had a trailer that it could tow, though I have no idea how frequently that was used and have no real plans to model it. There is a small lean-to shed in the Rockhill Furnace Shops complex with a track in to it that is currently used to store the M-1, though I'm not sure if that is where she was always stored or not. It would stand to reason that it would have been stored in a small shed where it was accessible instead of in the shops where a car or locomotive being worked on may be blocking it. That's just conjecture on my part, though. Nevertheless, it was on the railroad during the era I model (1937-1942), so I have acquired one to go on my layout. It was painted red with a white roof and had the letters "East Broad Top" on the side, with "M-3" written underneath. The railroad uses M-series numbers to number any of the large motorized equipment on the roster, such as the doodlebugs M-1 and M-2, and the M-4 through M-7 used on the modern Tourist era railroad.
The East Broad Top's sole surviving tank car is one of two known to exist, though it still has some mystery surrounding it. As with many narrow gauge tank cars, tank car #116 is a tank attached to a flat car, rather than having a frame (or no frame) to attach it to. The flatcar used was a standard East Broad Top steel flat car. A 6,000 gallon steel tank was permanently attached, and stabilization railings were added to either side. It was built sometime in the Great Depression, most likely in or just after 1936 from current records. Aaaaand that's where the known-for-sure bits stop. The East Broad Top had one other tank-on-flat-car, #102 (or maybe #103?), a wooden flat car with a tank made by Atlantic Refining Company (ARCo) mounted to it temporarily. Some identical tank bodies were used by the D&RGW narrow gauge, some on frames and some frameless, in GATX service. It's unknown whether that is the same tank currently on car #116, or if the tank is a copy. In any case, the tank car was utilized as a part of water trains that were run daily to Robertsdale at the end of the line during droughts. The tank car would carry potable water, while four "well-caulked" boxcars would carry non-potable water.
So, the M-3, as I said, is an unpowered 3D-printed model. I'm going to attempt to add windows to it, as well as paint and decal it. I'll be using .005" Evergreen clear styrene sheet and Microscale MI-9 Kristal Klear glue to put the windows in. To paint it I'll be using Tamiya fine surface primer, followed by a flat white on the roof, caboose red on the body, and a flat dark grey on the hood and frame. It'll get a small blast of some basic weathering, and that'll be that.
With the tank car, it'll be a bit more work. It is a kit made by Funaro & Camerlango. The couplers are Kadee scale HOn3 couplers, trucks are EBT Vulcan trucks from C&BT shops. Paints for the project will be an off-white for the body, and a dark grey or black for the body. I have a decal set from the FEBT as well.
Photos are posted as attachments rather than hosted and spliced in due to data limits at the current moment. Later I'll get them hosted and spliced in so it looks better, if desired.
![[Image: JWO03zH.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/JWO03zH.jpg)
