details – Page 5 – Notes on Designing, Building, and Operating Model Railroads

Lackawanna boxcars part 2

The last blog post focused on upgrading a pair of Accurail plastic HO scale 36-foot boxcars to follow Lackawanna prototypes. One of the details to remove are the door braces. In the lead image, I used an X-Acto #17 chisel blade to carefully remove the bulk of the molded on brace. Use a new blade, apply slow pressure, and wiggle the blade slightly to keep cutting the detail.

Lackawanna boxcars, part 1

DL&W 3855 looks like it was refreshed in the 1915 image taken by company photographer Watson B. Bunnell from the Lackawanna Collection at Steamtown NPS.

I’ve been planning to add a pair of Lackawanna boxcars to the freight car fleet. They had 15,295 boxcars listed in the October 1926 ORER. This isn’t a top ten overall quantity but they had the sixth most boxcars of railroads serving the Northeastern states. DL&W cars could have arrived on the Allegheny Yard branch in Pittsburgh via the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh connection. Plus, I like how their fleet looks.

Workbench Update – October and November 2020

I’ve been busier than expected the last couple of months. The lead photo is where I left off on the gondola models. Progress has moved forward to expand the freight car fleet.

Shawmut Boxcars

Fellow 1920s modeler Perry Squier recently sent details on his expanding HO scale Shawmut boxcar fleet. Here are his notes and photos.

Ray Breyer’s recent summary of freight cars with truss rod ends caught my interest. The Pittsburg Shawmut & Northern had several boxcars with these unique details in the 8700, 8800, and 8900 series that lasted well beyond the year I model, 1923. A 1904 AC&F builder image of #8700 leads this feature. I wanted to build several of them and needed a source for the underframe. I’ll scratch build the car body to get as close as possible to the prototype.

Prototype inside stake wood gondolas

Prototype gondola designs ran the gamut with wood and steel components. These cars were everywhere in the early 20th century and had many different features. Steve Hedlund has gathered details for an inside stake wood gondola review. This design was popular with a number of railroads. The Missouri Pacific rostered 6,000 of these at one time. Steve covers several other railroads plus a few gondolas that look similar but had slight differences. Westerfield Models offers an HO scale kit for this type of gondola.

This resource PDF document is available on the Freight Car Fleets page. We hope you find it useful to add a couple more gondolas to the fleet.

Many thanks to Steve Hedlund for this fine prototype car review.

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