Notes on Designing, Building and Operating Model Railroads

The seasons have turned from summer to autumn, and winter is arriving soon. All around my region projects are being completed. Familiar orange and white highway barrels are disappearing and the last harvests are being gathered. Meanwhile, my home layout project has stalled. The layout room floor remains untouched and in need of sanding and finishing. Someday soon this task will be completed and I can begin erecting the layout benchwork. For the want of a nail…

Other projects are moving forward even as the layout has not progressed. I’ve turned to my large stash of freight car kits and started building a few. Several are now ready for the paint shop. So to make this a more interesting read, I offer a progress report from the car shop foreman.

With a modeling focus on the late 1920s, many interesting freight cars of that period are available as kits made of polyurethane resin castings. These require more patience than plastic freight car kits offered by Accurail, Athearn and Roundhouse. A builder also needs to have an understanding of various hardware such as brake systems, doors, car ends, roofs, uncoupling levers and such. Working from prototype images often assists in the construction process. I’ve built a nymber of plastic kits over the years but had anxiety over building resin kits. Last winter I opened one of my many Westerfield boxes and began building an HO scale Baltimore & Ohio mill gondola. At first, I was hesitant as there were many small parts and a lengthy few pages of instruction. But I carefully read the instructions and prototype data sheets, and I checked over each piece. I crossed off a part or two of the instructions that only applied to a later period car. After a few hours over a few days, the car was ready for the paint shop. Here’s the underside where nearly all of the real work is on this kit. Click on the image for a larger view.

Building this model was a challenge but I found I was ready for the adventure. A key step for my success came by taking breaks. I would walk away from the workbench and take a break when frustration set in or if there are many repetative steps. Don’t try to complete an entire resin kit in one evening. Get through a subassembly or two and take a break or wait a day. It will make your initial resin kit experiences much more enjoyable.

After moving in to the new home in the spring, I thought I’d start another resin kit. An HO scale Funero & Camerlengo Baltimore & Ohio P-11 class flat car was handy. I dug up a few prototype images to focus on adding proper tack boards, uncoupling levers, and the brake retainer valve. A tedious part of this kit comes when adding the stake pockets. I worked through half a side then took a break and came back an hour later to finish the side. Then I waited until the next day to complete the other side with another break after attaching half the castings to the car. This is my first experience using the thicker cyano-acrylate (CA) gel adhesive. A longer set-up time allowed for easier positioning of the small stake pockets. Here’s how the model looks before painting. Click on the image for a larger view.

As the side sills are a deep fishbelly I did not add a brake system to the model. I used the space beteen the center sill and side sills to layer slabs of weight. Sheet lead was cut it to fit. This was actually the most difficult part of the model. I first made a paper template that fit the space, then used the paper template to cut several lead pieces to size. Barge brand contact cement was used to affix the weight in position. I was impressed with how easily the Barge cement handled. I’ve had poor contact cement expreiences in the past so this was a welcome relief. A thin film of Barge cement was applied to the mating surface of each part then set aside to air out for ten to fifteen minutes. Once the surfaces were dry to the touch, then the part can be placed into position and carefully pressed to make the contact cement grab. There isn’t much time at all to make adjustments so quick work is recommended.

Two other HO scale resin freight cars have joined these at the paint shop. I’ll cover those two and some upgrades I made to a plastic freight car in an upcoming post. Feel free to leave a comment below, but be sure to follow the directions of the anti-spam program.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 03:58 and is filed under modeling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.