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

LA Warehouse District Project - Poor Boxcar Storage

I stumbled across the rest of the boxcars I had from Accurail. I sorry to say they didn't survive the storage process very well. I am missing the under carriage for four of these and there are a number of different parts broken, mostly the stirrup steps. I'm unsure of whether I should just consign these to the junk drawer for practice shells or try and fix them back up.

It did give me the opportunity to play around with the new camera (Nikon 7500, my first new Nikon since 2008, essentially replaces my D70 and D90) though, I'm pretty happy with how the pictures came out. Oh the flaws we see under the harsh reality of a blown up picture.

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