Upgrading Plastic – Notes on Designing, Building, and Operating Model Railroads

Special runs – L&N ventilated box car

As I’m focused on modeling the Twenties, I keep an eye open for special run models that may fit my time frame. The recent Norfolk & Western box car produced for the N&WHS is an example. Sometimes an email arrives with a prototype question as a project comes together.

Vintage vehicles – 2

I took a break from building freight cars after an odd issue appeared on two boxcars when I applied a flat coat. I started building a Jordan Highway Miniatures 1923 Mack dump truck kit. After building it, I built another. I’ll need several vehicles for the future layout, so I kept building those kits. Oh, and I did solve the issue on the boxcars. Those details are in the previous post. Let’s take a close look at these Jordan kits.

Iron Range cars

Bob Hanmer sent several photos and details on a few neat projects that he recently completed. Here’s his story.

I spent last summer working on older, pre-1920 cars for service on my HO scale model railroad. The DM&IR continued to use some of these old boxcars and ore cars into 1958, the year I model. Since Dan Holbrook’s Signature Press book, “The Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Equipment: 1883-2004,” came out at the end of 2019, I was able to find information and photographs of the equipment and complete the projects.

Coal hopper details – pt 2

Let’s dive into more hopper upgrade ideas. Part one in the previous blog post covered end post replacement, and grab iron and hand hold replacements. Are you ready for more?

Coal hopper details

The last blog post covered upgrading hopper brake hardware from AB to KD brake components. The example was an HO scale plastic Bowser GLa class hopper. Let’s take a look at more upgrades you can make to hopper models.