I bought a couple F and C resin boxcar kits. They are truly beautiful kits.
Wondering the best source for detailed photos of a 36' boxcar rebuilt with steel doors and ends. Specifically looking for photos to help me detail brake gear, etc. I may be in a little over my head in knowing where all the bits and pieces go.
- Bill Rutherford Lancaster, NH
Central Vermont Railroad
What specific kits, I think they have offered dozens of boxcars
B RutherfordSpecifically looking for photos to help me detail brake gear, etc. I may be in a little over my head in knowing where all the bits and pieces go.
I have built a couple dozen F&C kits.
Honestly, I use my own "fakey brakey" detail system. It is not accurate, but it looks appropriate when the car is on the tracks.
-Photograph by Kevin Parson
These are beautiful kits, and you only need to model it well enough for it to look "right" on the rails.
-Kevin
Living the dream.
Kevin,
That is a good looking car! I considered grabbing a 40' boxcar from my layout and copying the brake detail. Struggling between "good enough" and OCD LOL
Bill.
Good enough has been replaced with " Layout Quality". Sounds better. For me there is layout quality and museum quality. I just started on a BCW kit of a PRR horse express car. Layout quality for me is rudimentary brake rigging, and necessary grab irons to look good. I know guys that have built similar cars with full interiors, the lamps along the ceiling, chains to the brake rod, and real cut glass for the windows. I'm sure my big fat fingers could break something real easy.
Pete.
I have only one F&C car, a very simple-to-build B&O boxcar...
If you want some examples of brake gear, here are a few...
...a GTW boxcar, built from a Tichy kit...
...with an AB brake system...
...and a similar car, but lettered for Canadian National...
...with a very similar underbody set-up, as the kits both came with all of the required details.
This one, another Tichy kit, has an older different type of brake gear, as is obvious in the side view...
...and a view of the underbody shows it to be KC brake gear, where all of the three components (air reservoir, control valve, and piston) are combined in a single unit.
This B&O boxcar, built from an Intermountain kit...
...has KD brakes (otherwise known as split-K types)...
...where the air reservoir is separate from the control valves and piston.
KD-type brakes were often used on hopper cars, as they were shorter than the original K-type, as there was limited space under a hoppers' slope-sheets. This not-yet painted Bowser (formerly Stewart) channel-side hopper has the piston to the left, and the control valve and air reservoir to the right....
...while this similar, but somewhat up-dated hopper, uses the more modern AB system, where the piston is partially visible to the left, and the control system atop the car's centre sill (also partially visible) and the air reservoir at the right edge....
This scratchbuilt boxcar is one of the very few cars to which I've added most of the prototypical piping...
...which is usually only visible if there's a derailment, with freight cars rolling over and down embankments, revealing such details.I'm more apt to include the brake gears' major components, along with the necessary faux rodding which supposedly activates the car's brakes.
As you can see in most of the underside views, the brake rods tend to head for the car's centresills, so as to not interfere with the rotation of the trucks when the train enters a curve.
Wayne
Example of the "Fakey Brakey" rigging:
-Photographs by Kevin Parson
It looks good enough in pictures, and takes about 1/3 the time and effort of doing it right.
B RutherfordWondering the best source for detailed photos of a 36' boxcar rebuilt with steel doors and ends.
I have quite a few 36' boxcars, but most of them have wood ends and wooden doors.
I have a dozen or so of these...
...which were somehow connected to LifeLike and also TrueLine Trains. However, the original offering here in Canada had mistakes in the factory lettering, and the manufacturers offered replacement body shells for anybody who returned the original body shells to the store where they were purchased.Once the improved body shells were delivered, the hobbyshop (where I usually bought my train stuff), put the faulty body shells on sale, and I bought pretty well all that I could find on several visits.I did, of course, needed to buy trucks and couplers for the body shells that I had bought, and also had to build new underbodies for all of them.
I also re-did the oversized plastic grabirons, and bought new lettering (C-D-S dry transfers) for all of the cars.
Some time later, Accurail released their version of the Dominion-Fowler cars, and I bough a dozen of them, all with wood doors and wood ends, too. The roofs, like the original prototypes, were a representation of t&g planks, but because I'm modelling the late '30s, rather than the time when these cars first appeared, around 1908, I re-covered the roofs using sheet and strip styrene.Here's a view of the original roof...
...and the roof mostly re-done as a sheet-metal roof, with the new running boards being added, too....
Since these cars were intended to belong to one of my free-lanced railroads, I decided to paint the new roofs and the cars wooden-ends black, like most of my larger and more modern (late '30s) boxcars...
At about the same time, I decided that these cars could have been in-service for some time, so opted to modify a few of them with steel doors.That turned out to be a little more time consuming than I had expected, as the Accurail cars have very thick plastic for the non-operating doors.Here are some with their new doors...
...and also took time to add some rudimentary brake gear...
...here's one painted and lettered...
...and a few after some weathering...
As you can see in the earlier photo of the underbody brake gear, it's pretty basic, with the brake rods, on fairly short cars, rapidly heading towards the centre-sill, so that they'll not interfere with the rotation of the trucks.
Here's a somewhat more realistic version of brake gear on a 40' scratchbuild steel boxcar...
...but with the brake rods again keeping out of the way of the car's trucks.
Here's a view of the car's "B-end"...
...and the finished car...
I hope that some of the above words and pictures will be of use.
Thank you Wayne, definitely helpful!
And thank you, Bill, for your kind comments.