LA Warehouse District - Building a Freight Car

A long time ago when I was first envisioning this layout I had decided that I would populate it solely with Blueprint Series Freight Cars from Branchline trains and I started a bit of a stockpile. At some point after that the line was discontinued (although has since been picked up by Atlas, nothing has been done with it). While I have a number of Accurrail kits in various stages of completion I have never actually built one of the Blueprint series cars. It was time to rectify this and see what I might be getting into.

First thing I noticed just pulling out the parts is that these cars are likely to be pretty fragile, something that was borne out during the construction of this first kit. The instructions are okay at best, but the one in this kit looked like a photocopy and not a good photocopy and it some places was pretty useless because the grainy picture no longer showed any detail. That's what reference books are for.

It went together pretty well in the end. Just required careful cutting from the sprues. There was a lot more flash than I expected to see, especially on the grab irons which was difficult to remove at times. As I was finishing the car up though I came across the single biggest problem. My kit has the wrong doors. Without measuring these are the doors for a 40' car, not the doors for a 50' car. Since they aren't manufactured anymore I will have to figure out away to acquire new doors for this one. Due to the fragile nature of the brake lines I managed to break one of those during the construction. I'll probably just replace it with wire at this point. Lord knows I have access to wire. Between getting the wrong doors and breaking pieces during construction that puts a damper on my enthusiasm for building the rest of them.

The Kit

The Tools

That's a lot of stuff

The weights

Brakes

Underframe finished

Ready to work on the top

Roof, note the doors, just a tad to small for this car.

"A" end

"B" end

Research - "Listing of Freight Cars by Class and Car Number 1906-1991"

This book took forever to arrive. I think it too took them 12 days to actually get into the mail to me. That is a problem with some of these third party book guys on Amazon. So this is the kind of book that only a researcher would enjoy. Which means I find it fascinating! Just a lot of numbers in columns and rows. This should be the last piece of the puzzle I need to finish off the research on the Santa Fe Boxcars trying to figure out which were the most common types and how many I should set my sites on. I'm thinking about 50 freight cars of various types for the layout right now, with maybe 15-25 active on the layout at any given point. Will see how that goes.

A page that only a researcher could love.

Research - Freight Car Fleet Development; ATSF - Part 2

I started with a spreadsheet and translated all the boxcar data from the Railway Registry PDF into something that I could manipulate and add more data too. There are almost 300 different boxcar series listed in the Registry so it was a bit of painstaking task to get it all in there and I'm sure there are a few mistakes. I actually caught some typos in the original manuscript just to through a bit of a twist into the research.

The first thing I did was take the Shock Control Era book and compare the numeric series with those on the spreadsheet and add a couple columns for the boxcar identification and the year it went into service. I am not concerned with the year it went out of service if it existed on the 1975 Railway Registry then its fair game for inclusion on the layout. This gave me the type for just over 1/3 of the list (122 series to be precise), which represents 60 different boxcar types that were built or rebuilt on or after 1954. The rest were built prior to that date and of course the reference book for that is out of print and going for $100+ when you can find it. Once the other reference book, "Santa Fe Railway Listing of Freight Cars by Class and Car Numbers, 1906-1991", arrives I should be able to find the  the rest of the boxcars classes on the list. Of those already identified I can eliminate anything longer than a 50' car (the layout is being designed around the brick canyon, which will limit freight cars to 50' or less) and any car exclusive to the automobile industry. I can further eliminate cars that are rare as they were unlikely to have appeared in the Patch section of the LA Warehouse District unless they happen to provide service to an industry in that area.

At this point in time there is still a significant number of 40' boxcars on the roster. These consist primarily of Bx-85s,  Bx-136s, Bx-126s and Bx-115s. Not surprisingly the 50' boxcars make up the majority of the roster at this point.The most numerous are Bx-72s, Bx-69s, Bx-66s, Bx81s, Bx-74s, Bx-145s, and Bx-70s. Now, admittedly, the data is not complete but it gives me start on what I can find commercially. Of course manufacturer's don't make this easy, rarely do you find the Santa Fe's class listed on the side of a boxcar. So that will take a little more digging up than I care to think about.

Santa Fe Bx-85, 40' boxcar

Santa Fe Bx-115, a 40' boxcar

Santa Fe Bx-126, a 40' boxcar

Santa Fe Bx-136, a 40' boxcar

Santa Fe Bx-69, a 50' boxcar

Santa Fe Bx-81, a 50' boxcar

LA Warehouse District Project - Motive Power and Rolling Stock

I continued to dig around and see what I have in the way of freight cars for the LA Warehouse district. I remembered that I had intended to just use the Branchline Blueprint series of boxcars but they literally discontinued as I started to buy them and they became scarce very quickly. Sometime between then and now Atlas picked up the line but near as I can tell they are not producing anything for the AT&SF. I will certainly pickup up some of the appropriate foreign roads in this line though, at least when I get that far. I'm guessing this is the reason I started to pick up some Athearn box and refrigerator cars.

The other thing I'm not quite sure of is what the proportion of 40' cars to 50' cars would or should be. I have stumbled on that one set of 40' Athearn Santa Fe cars so that might be the extent of my 40' fleet.

For motive power I'll be using the CF7s in the pictures below, both of these have the round cab, I might try and find one with the angled cab for a little bit more variety.

Still lots to think about for the freight car fleet but the motive power is pretty much set unless I back up the timeline in which case I'll need to see about finding some HH1100s.

If anyone has any of these kits for the Santa Fe I would be interested in adding a few more

LA Warehouse District Project - Old Freight Cars Uncovered

Again while rummaging through the HO scale equipment I came across these four 50' freight cars that I had weathered quite a while back. Unfortunately I must have packed the the underframes and the trucks away in a different box. All I have here are the shells. I am still pleased with these early attempts at weathering. I think I have at least one post on how I did it that I'll have to go back and read to figure out what I did.

I also dug up the two CF7s that will be the primary motive power and another dozen or so freight cards from Athearn and Roundhouse that I can work on. I'm pretty certain there is yet another box of refrigerator cars that I had started some work on as well.

I'm going to need to do something about the roof walk on this one.

This one is looking pretty good.

A foreign car that will operate on the layout. The Western Pacific still exists in the time frame of my LA Warehouse District

Another foreign car. This one will be pushing it a bit, I think this Reefer from the Burlington was introduced after the time frame I have in mind. But I like the yellow contrast of this car to the AT&SF ones that will provide the bulk of the deliveries.

Airbrushing Freight Cars with Tru-Scale Paint

When I started this little project I figured I would just fall back on those old stand by railroad paints from Floquil. Well I haven't been paying attention and Testors, who bought Floquil, has discontinued them, in fact discontinued them some time ago. Not knowing much about the railroad paints available now I leaned on somebody that has been more involved than me, Darel from C&Sn3. He recommended Tru-Scale as the best replacement at this point. I went to Caboose Hobbies, who didn't have the color that Darel recommended, and I stood in front of the paint rack for 15 minutes and decided on TCP-139 MOPAC Boxcar Red. I then went looking around for information on how to shoot this paint through an airbrush. This is definitely airbrush paint and a bit on the expensive side at $4.99 for a one ounce bottle. I grabbed all three bottles Caboose had to make sure I had enough and for future additions to the C&N rolling stock roster. After reading up on it that may have been a mistake. Apparently Tru-Scale has a tendency to evaporate out of the bottle, probably because it has an acetone base. Which brings up the fact that this is a solvent based paint and when you shoot it through your airbrush be in a well ventilated area, or a use an airbrush booth and either way wear a mask, and not one of those little sanding masks.

So there is a lot of different information out there and a lot of it is not very informative. In fact I even saw one post that said that Tru-Scale didn't use pigment and that's why it didn't separate. Now that is possible as colors are either built from pigment or dyes, but generally anything called paint uses pigment (inks are dyes). Tru-Scale talks about pigment right on their website. So I combined the information I could find into something that, I hoped, would work for me. This paint is pretty thin already but it wouldn't go through my Infinity airbrush straight from the bottle. I pulled out some little graduated cups that I keep around and measured out three parts paint to one part acetone, that's right acetone as a paint thinner. I got lucky and hit the right combo off the bat and this 3:1 ratio worked like a charm.

Going into the booth were four boxcars, one stockcar, two flatcars, two short cabooses and one combine caboose. The C&N kept all its freight cars and cabooses the same color which means I don't have to switch out colors. Most of the prep consisted of removing trucks and in the case of the cabooses applying a liquid mask to all the windows. The cabooses I completely dissembled and removed the interior lighting components. They are actually quite nicely detailed on the inside, to bad you can't really see it through those small windows.

So two bottles of paint and 10 cars later I was finished, a pretty good days work. The cabooses will probably need some touch up. Its hard getting up underneath some of the overhangs and I found a thumbprint on the side of one so back to the booth for those, probably later this week. With the painting done this bunch is ready to see if these brand new decals I made are going to work. Pretty exciting stuff!

On to the pictures!

Three boxcars like this.

Fortunately only one in this ugly color

One stockcar

two flatcars

The reefer, although I reconsidered and left this one in yellow. I'll go back and do some decals in black for this one.

Disassembling a caboose. Removed the lighting and was surprised by the nice detail on the inside.

Easier to see the detail on the red interior as opposed to the black interior in the first caboose

Dissembling the second one, went much quicker this time.

The combine caboose, of course this one didn't come apart in quite the same way.

The interior, again some nice detail that you just can't see

Airbrushing complete! I left the stockcar with a black roof.

The cabooses and the flatcars.