The prototype Great Western Railway had a large number of drop bottom gondolas for hauling sugar beets. They started with 150 small wooden gondolas in the early 1900s and increased their capacity with wooden racks on the top edges.  In 1949, the GWR started buying used steel drop bottom gondolas to replace the wooden ones and eventually had a fleet of 188 units.  All were sold for scrap starting in 1979 when trucks became the predominate method of hauling beets.

Just an update to the upper level design

Rob

Hello and thanks for looking. I hope to document my layout as it goes form paper and my thoughts to real wood and track. I will be updating as I progress and welcome your comments.

I seem to be a little too dense to add photos to regular discussion forums. I wanted to share a couple of new photos on Driline WPF 1-13 thru 1-15 but can't figure it out. So here are a couple of new shots of my layout. By the way, comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Gary

I've been drafting a timetable for the rapidly approaching start of formal operations on the layout.  The following posts show some images of how it's shaping up.  Formatting, wording and so on are copied from prototype WP timetables wherever practical.  So far I'm working with a very abbreviated amount of information, four pages plus the inside and outside covers. 

Building the Employee Timetable

Once all the planning has been done and the meets and conflicts resolved, it's time to build the employee timetable (ETT) page  that  the crews will use.  I have a separate worksheet for the ETT to make sure I don’t “damage” the formulas on the planning worksheet. 

In my last posting http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/6710 I had gotten to the point of starting to finish and install the tunnel portal.  This posting shows the latest work in that area.

Here the portal is just sitting in place for a test fit after adding paint & grass.

A thread for those of you who would like to follow along on my layout lighting progress.

Thought I’d start a blog to document the completion of the scenery at SJ Cabin on my Chesapeake, Wheeling and Erie Railroad. Perhaps there will be a few techniques that readers on the MRH Forum will find helpful.