As with many model railroaders, when you're in the hobby for a while you accumulate a wide variety of projects. Often having "several" on the go at once.

I was getting to the point where I had bits and pieces from various projects scattered over my workbench, with various parts in various old leftover kit boxes. This organization left something to be desired, so I got some foam core sheets and made some "standardized" project boxes, so that I could simultaneously achieve several goals:

- clean up my work space

Algoma Central Railway

• Algoma Central Railway Operations Series

• Algoma Central Passenger Equipment Builds

• Algoma Central Railway Scratchbuilt and Kitbashed Rolling Stock

• Algoma Central Railway Structures

Pulpwood logs are a significant traffic item on the Algoma Central, and a type of load I'll need quite a supply of for my flatcars and gondolas.

If you actually look at most modern gondolas out there today, you’ll find that most open top cars from the last 30 years or so actually don’t have any interior paint or coating, but instead the interior of the cars are raw, unpainted steel (other than perhaps some overspray from the painting of the exterior of the car).

Modeling a Canadian regional railway means a lot of connecting traffic from Canada's two major railways, Canadian Pacific and Canadian National.

This thread illustrates several examples of CN rolling stock, mostly custom paint jobs and some kit-bashes for service on my model railway.

Modeling a Canadian regional railway means a lot of connecting traffic from Canada's two major railways, Canadian Pacific and Canadian National.

This thread illustrates several examples of CP rolling stock, mostly custom paint jobs and some kit-bashes for service on my model railway.

I got a little tired of digging around in my box of packages of styrene strip to try and find the specific size I need for whatever project I'm working on, so I broke out the foam core board and whipped up a little something.

Modeling a prototype line means most or all of the structures will be either kitbashed or customized. Particularly when you're modeling a smaller and more remote regional railway, so "Canadian Pacific Standard no. 3 Station" doesn't really fit the bill.

My road of choice is the Algoma Central Railway, a Canadian regional railway in northern Ontario. This thread documents structure builds for some of the railway specific structures I'm building for my future ACR layout.

There's a number of different model rr software products out there to create car cards and waybills for your model railroad, or pre-printed forms like the ones you can get from Micro-Mark that you fill in by hand.

But they're fairly easy to make yourself with almost any spreadsheet software. I used Microsoft Excel since I happened to have it, but any other spreadsheet software will have the same or similar features.

I wrote up more details on how I print my own car cards and waybills on my personal blog. Read more here:

In order to have a certainly amount of variability in our traffic and simulate slight variations in customer demand so that some customers don't always get cars in a session, at our club we developed a basic spreadsheet using a random number generator function to come up with how many cars to order for different customers or car types.