doctorwayne's New Years Resolution Challenge...

[doctorwayne]

Finally got a couple more cars finished.
First up is the MDC truss rod reefer. That's the one which needed its fascia boards replaced because someone was a little heavy-handed with his sanding technique, and it was last seen in grey primer. I decided to letter it for my free-lance Grand Valley Export Company, which is the Grand Valley's refrigerator car subsidiary, much as MDT was for New York Central or SFRD for the Santa Fe. While checking for un-used numbers, I re-discovered three other GVEX cars, all slightly re-worked Tyco cars. Their plastic floors are sagging and I intend to scratchbuild new ones, but not as part of this Challenge. Here's the latest addition, being dropped-off at National Grocers:





As you may recall, jwb offered some good suggestions about an Espee automobile car to which I had added some underbody brake gear. I managed to find a photo of a prototype car, and in addition to adding the storage tubes for the tie-down chains and a white stripe on the door to show that the car was equipped with Evan's Auto-Loaders, I decided to re-work the car to more closely match the photo.
The easy part was adding the storage tubes. I couldn't find a photo which clearly showed their placement, so I took a guess based on the fact that a car like this would hold five automobiles. I didn't include the tubes which would be near the car's ends, as I didn't want them to interfere with truck swing. The ones shown were cut from 3/64" styrene rod and cemented into holes drilled in the car's floor:



I next removed both the upper and lower door tracks, along with the doors. The upper track's mounting slot was filled-in with strip styrene, then more strip was used to create a new, finer upper door track. The tabbed side sills were then removed completely, and replaced with a straight one built-up from various sizes of Evergreen strip styrene. The visible part is cemented to the bottom edge of the car's side, then reinforced from behind with some thin strip. I also added a long reinforcing tab below the area of the door openings, along with a new lower door track (the stock Athearn lower door tracks on most house cars sit too high, a concession to "working" doors). Because the profile of the inside face of the car was changed by the reinforcing for the sills, I also added blocks to maintain the carbody at the proper height on the underbody.



Lowering the bottom door track meant that the stock doors were now too short, so I cut up some spare doors and grafted them onto the modified tops of the originals. The white styrene seen in the interior of the door openings in the photo above are to provide strength to the butt-cemented joints and to prevent the modified doors from warping.



As you can see, some of the car's rivet detail along the lower edges was damaged during all this fiddling, so I shaved rivets off the left-over parts of the donor doors used in the height increase and added them to the car. While they're fairly visible here, and not all that straight, I think they'll look acceptable once the car is repainted.



Next, I used a rag dipped in methyl hydrate to remove the lettering, then tossed the car body into the sink for a quick wash. After spraying with Floquil Grey Primer to give an even base for the final paint, it was airbrushed with a custom-mixed boxcar red, then lettered with C-D-S dry transfers. I took the opportunity to give it a correct number and a BLT. date of Oct. 1936. Shown below, she's already had her first re-weigh but is only lightly weathered. The door stripe, by the way, is two 1.5" stripes from Champ. I didn't have the very tiny lettering that should be either on or below it, but please don't tell anybody.



The final Challenge car (other than the eight Athearn boxcars which will definitely not be finished in time) is the Southern Su-class boxcar. I used the MDC boxcar shown near the beginning of this thread, but it required some modifications to make it a little more like its prototype.
The prototype car has both a steel centre sill and truss rods, much like the reefer shown above. However, the Su-class boxcars had their queenposts mounted on an I-beam which is very visible from trackside. I used I-beam material from Evergreen, trimming the MDC queenpost casting to remove some of its excessive thickness, especially on the outermost (most visible) ends. The pictures, below, show most of the construction details. I made-up the brake levers from sheet brass, while the rods are .012" stainless steel wire. The truss rods are monofilament fishing line, while the turnbuckles (not yet cemented in place in the first two photos) are from Tichy.







As you can see, the I-beams end at the edge of the floor, while on the real car, they extended to the outside face of the car's siding. With the cast plastic sides' excessive thickness, the car just didn't look right. I finally decided to add short I-beam extensions to the lower edge of the car. They're cemented in place, then, once the cement had fully hardened, the bracing was added using .010"x.060" strip styrene. First, using lacquer thinner, the over-length strips were cemented to the I-beam, then, when the cement had set, bent down to the sidesill, and then bent again to provide a gluing surface to affix then to the bottom edge of the car. I also added short lengths of .012" brass wire to represent the bolts used on the real ones, drilling through the straps and into the car's sides. (The sheet styrene seen in the centre of the car's interior is to support the new roof.)







The roof replaces a board-type one which came with the kit. Most of the almost 15,000 cars built got Hutchins "Dry Lading" roofs, so I built a simplified version using sheet and strip styrene. The roofwalk and laterals are HO scale 2"x6", distressed with a razor saw.



Over the course of building such a large block of cars, several different ends were used, including Hutchins with tapered panels, Hutchins with straight panels, a T-brace end, and, on the last 1500 cars, Murphy 7-7 ends. I opted for the Hutchins with straight panels, as that's what was shown in the photo.





The ladders are simply strip styrene with custom-bent stainless steel rungs, to which I added short lengths of .012" brass wire to represent the mounting bolts. Brake gear components and door hardware is from Tichy.
After a quick wash and a coat of Floquil Grey Primer, I airbrushed the entire car, including the underbody, with Floquil's Southern Freight Car Brown, one of the few times I've used a paint colour without altering it. The roadname and numbers are dry transfers from a C-D-S set for a 50' automobile car, while the dimensional data is from Champ.





I have one more car, not shown in my original photos, which should be finished before the deadline, and I'll keep plugging away at those eight Athearn cars, too. I'll continue to post photos of them here, even after the Challenge has ended (and may toss-in those three Tyco reefers, too - no sense in quitting now that I've got myself in-gear.)

Wayne