Container Flats and Auto Racks
It seems that none of these projects I'm currently working on will actually be used on my layout. At least I'm getting them completed!
Next up, I made progress on the VTTX container car mentioned in my previous post. I think it's turned out quite well so far. No 80's or 90's intermodal train is complete without at least one of these cars.
It took some fidgeting to get the container end pedestals located correctly. The detail kit is meant for the Roundhouse 62' flatcar, but the Intermountain car is only 60'. That means the end pedestals end up hanging over the end a bit, just like on the prototype. The containers still wanted to push the end pedestals out a bit more making them crooked, so I'm just going to say that the car was humped one time too many.
The nice thing about using the Intermountain car is that you can leave off the deck and get that nice see-through look like the prototype. The downside is it leaves absolutely no extra place for weight. I used my soldering iron to melt some Cerrobend (a.k.a. Wood's Metal, same thing as Walthers Temp-Lo) into the centersill. I just need to track down the appropriate decals for it and it will be complete.
While digging through boxes for the umpteenth time, I decided that a couple of auto racks needed to get completed.
Here we have an old Custom Rails tri-level auto rack. For a few years, these were the only options available for plastic enclosed auto rack cars. These were also a flat-side kit but were nowhere near as easy to assemble as the Eel RIver kits. Custom Rails was another manufacturer that sold decorated kits as painted parts and a decal sheet, and all I had left to do was decal the car. In the end I basically rebuilt the entire thing.
The kit consisted of the auto rack parts to be built on top of their existing 89' flatcar. However, once assembled, the car sat way too high. The bolsters needed to be rebuilt to lower the car down to the same height as other auto racks. For a tri-level, the flat should sit even lower so that it almost completely hides the trucks, but that's just not possible with this model so it's fine the way it is now.
Testing on the track, the car just didn't look right. It always leaned to one side. After getting the bolsters flat, I realized that the deck was slightly skewed on the flatcar. Fortunately when I originally built it I used CA for all the joints, and as I tried to flex it back into place, it went "snap!" and turned back into a flat-side kit. I scraped off all the old CA and reassembled it using plastic cement, taking care to ensure everything was nice and square.
This is my oldest unfinished project. I bought my very first brass car at the 1986 NMRA convention in Boston, and this is it. It represents a less-common rack in that it has the end finger doors instead of solid doors. It lingered for a few years until I could find a prototype to match, then aha! CN has racks with end finger doors, and the noodle is applied to the corrugated side panel (not a solid flat panel). Then it sat for several more years while I tried to figure out the best way to paint it. Should I try and brush paint? Should I try and mask off the side panels and spray it? Ultimately I ended up masking and spraying the flatcar and end panels, and then brush painting all the intermediate posts. I wasn't too hapy with the results and couldn't decide whether to strip it and start over, or try to fix the mistakes, so it sat and waited. And waited...
Finally I decided to finish it. During its years of waiting, it got moved from its original box (re-purposed for a locomotive) to another box, and then another. At some point the box it was in got dropped and the roof got pushed in on one end. Not to be deterred, I dug out my resistance soldering unit and repaired all the busted solder joints. Inspecting some more, the paint wasn't as bad as I thought. One side panel had visible brush strokes, and there were several areas with a bit of over-brushing onto the corrugated panels, but that was fixed with a bit of scraping.
This is another car that needs long-shank couplers, add some weathering to hide the remaining imperfections, and it's complete.
Craig