Pulpwood Flat Cars

[dstarr]

This is a trainset quality car from a train show.  I never did find a makers mark anywhere on it.  I brush painted the bark part of the log load with burnt umber, the trucks with red auto primer, Dullcote over the topside to kill the plastic gloss, and the undercarriage with dark gray auto primer.

Here is all of em.  A IHC Mogul on point.  Bachmann bobber caboose, and five pulpwood cars. 

[dknelson]

The inner slant on the sides of those bulkheads makes me assume this is the Tyco car from the 1980s.

http://hoseeker.net/gallery/index.php?album=mantuatyco%2Ftycobrownbox01&image=tyco334a50pulpwoodflatcar.jpg

Revell had a similar car in the late 1950s but the bulkhead had verticle inward sides, not slanted.

http://hoseeker.net/revellinformation/Revell1959infopage07.jpg

I was always intrigued by the device they used to make the pulpwood fit evenly within the side limits of a flatcar such as this.  It used sheets of steel on both sides to press in and press the load from both sides, using air cylinders to move the steel sheets.  I am not describing this terribly well.  The March 1966 issue of MR has a drawing of what I am talking about, if you have the issue or the All Access pass to back issues.

Dave Nelson

 

 

[SeeYou190]

Those are absolutely one of the better Tyco freight cars.

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Yours look very nice.

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-Kevin

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[mbinsewi]

dknelson

The March 1966 issue of MR has a drawing of what I am talking about, if you have the issue or the All Access pass to back issues.

I just checked it out, and "well I'll be...."  Thats how they did that.

Nice looking cars, DStarr.  I have a couple of the Revel cars, and I believe they also have sprung trucks.

Mike.

[doctorwayne]

Those loads look good, David! 

I had a 40' Athearn pulpwood car, bought many years ago, which didn't really fit into my plans for the layout I have now.  However, inspired by some prototype Algoma Central cars I saw in a passing train, I decided that I could make it into something more suited to my industrial operations.

I cut the car in half, then spliced the halves back together with an additional 12'-or-so of .060" sheet styrene.  The underframe went into the "parts department" for use elsewhere, and the underside of the floor was reinforced with a full-length sheet of .060" styrene.
I then added overlays of .010" sheet styrene to the original sidesills, augmented with some vertical stiffeners (Evergreen .060" square strips) and new top chords, and had a 53' bulkhead gondola (with higher ends than the ACR ones which inspired the project - no point in making extra work trying to cut them down)...

I liked the results so much that I bought two more pulpwood cars, both used and very reasonably-priced, and made two more bulkhead gondolas.
(In case anybody has noticed that date in the photo above, referring to the car's weight when it was first built, I have changed it to more properly represent a car built in the late '30s. The EG&E was always on the cutting edge of new technology, but apparently did get ahead of themselves on occasion. )

Walther's model of the GSC flatcars came with optional parts to represent early piggyback cars (not suitable for my late '30s layout), or bulkhead flatcars, possibly for pulpwood loading.
However, I liked them as simple flatcars, and built them as such...

I did use some of the ends, though, installing them on some Athearn 50' flatcars.  I modified the cars so that they sat lower, then removed the original plastic deck and replaced it with stripwood - the project was mainly to use-up leftover stripwood, as I prefer to build in styrene.  The Walthers ends were added to the modified Athearn cars, and the resultant cars are used mostly in lumber service...

Now, if I could only remember where I put the rest of those ends.

Wayne