WEEKLY PHOTO FUN - AUGUST 24th-30th
#1
I recently picked up this Accurail model of a NYS&W Fowler boxcar.  The car is nicely-done, with good detail, including a fairly complete underbody....

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However, it has a board roof (as did many of the originals) and no lateral roofwalks on the roof near the ladders, only corner grabirons near the corners of the roof (as was common on many cars built before the '20s)....I scraped-off the latter, and replaced them with formed wire ones.

[Image: 100_7357.jpg]

I also bought 10 undecorated versions of the same car, to be painted and lettered for my own EG&E railroad, set in the late '30s.  There's a good chance that many of the original Fowler cars later got some form of metal roof (some of the first original prototypes were built with full metal roofs) so I decided to rework one of the ten to see how it would look...

I cut two panels from .010" sheet styrene, just slightly larger than each half of the roof (a number of roofwalk supports - 27 per car, or 270 for the ten cars) separate the two sides, and I deemed it not worth the trouble to remove them - we'll see how well they, and the board roof between them, are hidden...or not...once the car is painted.  


I used a brush as wide as one side of the roof to place a generous application of MEK on half the roof, then quickly added the styrene panel to each side.  I then set the car aside overnight, to see if there were an imprints of the boards showing through due to the heavy application of solvent.

The next day, the roof appeared to be unblemished, so I trimmed it to size and added some ribs, based on those on an old Train Miniature boxcar.
The bottom piece is Evergreen .010"x.080" strip styrene, with a rib made from Evergreen .040" half-round strip.  Because of the extra thickness of the new roof, I had to raise the tops of the roofwalk supports, doing so with strips of .010"x.030" styrene strip. 
The roofwalk which comes with the car has nicely moulded-in board detail, but like the Proto-1000 Fowler cars release some years ago, it's short by 6" on both ends.  Both companies may have been using different drawing that the ones I have, which show a full 1' overhang on each end of the car, rather than just 6".  Anyway, like I did with the Proto cars, I opted to create a longer roofwalk, complete with laterals, using HO scale 2"x6", from Evergreen...

[Image: S0015659.jpg]

[Image: S0025660.jpg]

Yet to be added are the supports for the ends of the lengthened roofwalks

[Image: 100_7356.jpg]

I've decided that the roofs will be acceptable, so won't bother painting the test mule until the other nine are done, too.


Wayne
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WEEKLY PHOTO FUN - AUGUST 24th-30th - by doctorwayne - 08-25-2018, 12:05 AM

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