My hobby time over the past month has been spent on several small freight car projects. I'm whittling down my stockpile of unbuilt kits and making minor improvements to other cars in the fleet.
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| ITC 8427 is an Accurail car that's been in my fleet for a long time. After seeing a builder's photo of a prototype car from this series, I removed the running board and painted the trucks red. I also swapped out the black underbody and brake gear that came with this car with a red underbody from another Accurail PS-1 in my fleet. |
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| ITC 3843 is an MDC Roundhouse gondola that has also been in my fleet for many years. The red trucks on 1970s-era ITC freight cars were striking and unique, so this car's trucks got painted at the same time I did the 8427's trucks. |
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| Formerly an identical twin, but now a fraternal one. I have two of these Accurail Rock Island ACF Center Flow covered hoppers, but both were numbered 800365. For this car, I took advantage of Accurail's renumbering decals for the first time. At the same time they produce a car, Accurail paints a small sheet of decal paper with matching paint and prints several additional car numbers on it. I learned the hard way on the ends of this car to trim the new numbers very close to the lettering because the decal edges are difficult to hide even though they're painted the same color as the rest of the car. The sides turned out ok. |
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| This Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern boxcar is an Athearn Blue Box kit that's been in my stash for a couple of years. I didn't make any changes to the car body, though I did rebuild the underframe to correct the low coupler height and move the coupler boxes a bit farther out from the ends. I don't know how often MNS cars were seen on the TP&W, maybe never, but I like this car as a shout out to places I used to live. |
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| The Peoria & Eastern was a direct competitor to the TP&W, but I have a soft spot for obscure railroads of central Illinois. This Branchline Trains kit waited almost 10 years for me to finally assemble it. Prior bad experiences with Branchline Trains kits made me somewhat hesitant to start working on this one. These kits have lots of very delicate plastic parts that are challenging to install, don't fit particularly well in the mounting holes, have casting flash in inconvenient locations, and are usually molded in a very different color of plastic than they are painted so the sprue marks are very obvious. Assembly of this car went relatively smoothly and touch-up of the many black parts was easy, but this will probably be the last Branchline Trains kit I build. |
