The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

The photo above has something a bit out the ordinary in it: an F-35 fighter jet. Kid #2 asked for a model F-35 on his Christmas list, so "Santa" popped over to Burnaby Hobbies and did some shopping.   Normally Santa buys paint, thinner and other general modelling supplies when he visits this store as it isn't a railway focused hobby shop.  This go around he looked through the very large selection of model kits and came away with an Airfix 1:72 kit with both a Spitfire (which also happens to be the first model I ever built while in hospital getting my adenoids out when I was 6) and an F-35 Lightning II.  Kid #2 was quite happy on Christmas morning when he opened the gift.   These are a nice basic beginner kit that has sufficient detail to be interesting while not being an overly complicated model to assemble.  Kid #2 did a good job of assembly with some help from dad over a couple of days, with only a few fingerprints melted into the plastic from a bit ...

CN used "Line Car Control" books to help crews with serving the many customers throughout their system.  These are great tools for those of us looking to replicate the prototypical operations on our layouts.  Previously I had received a Line Car Control book from 1986 which was a great help in sorting out customers, tracks use, etc.   Recently the CNRHA received a sizable donation of documents from the estate of a former CN employee.  I have been sorting through these documents and have begun to scan them for future use on the CNRHA website.   One very interesting part of the documents is an undated Line Car Control book for The Pas Servocentre.  it appears to be a late 1960's/early 1970's era book based on a few things, most notably that the kraft mill and log yard are either proposed or under construction.  Based on some research of the checkered history ( Churchill Forest Industries Scandal  and The Pas mill history  are interes...

CN operated a sizable fleet of mechanical refrigerator cars from the mid 1960's through to the mid 1990's with some cars operating into the mid 2000's. Most of these cars have since been replaced by mechanical reefer containers.  Hawker Siddeley constructed 75 mechanical refrigerator cars in 1966, initially in the 231100-231174 series.  Later in 1967/68 50 cars were renumbered into the 233000-233049 series.  I am unsure of why this was done, but CN had a major freight car renumbering program in the late 1960s that can make your head spin trying to figure out.   The cars were delivered in the noodle paint scheme with a silver body and blue door to denote the cars use in meat service.  Later on some cars had silver painted doors, likely allowing their use in general refrigerator service.   Kaslo Shops has brought out this car type both with and without roof walks.  I built these two cars for their box art, 231152 for the roof walk version with ...

A well weathered CN 1929 boxcar in Winnipeg, on its way to the Winnipeg Railway Museum circa 1995; if only I had the foresight to measure the brake gear when I had the chance... I have wrapped up a long dormant boxcar project.  While digging through my stash of freight cars I found a Kaslo Shops Distributing Canadian National 40 foot 1929 single sheath boxcar in a box, assembled (not sure if it was me or something I bought at a train show)  but unpainted.  I decided to remedy that situation.   Side view of the brake rigging - I need to find a museum with one of these cars to measure and photograph! Before I got too far I had to address an issue with the brake rigging. On the prototype there was a clevis, crank, chain and anchor set up that I have never seen done in model form. I finally came across a few prototype slides in my collection with clear enough views of this arrangement to make an attempt at representing it. An Intermountain part along with some scrat...

I have been on a bit of a Canadian Pacific bent as of late.  I have been working on a number of Kaslo Shops kits for the CP Hawker Siddeley 50 foot boxcar fleet; specifically 2 door rod and 4 door rod newsprint cars both with and without roofwalks, 50 foot autopart boxcars with and without roofwalks, and a Hawker Siddeley 50 foot mechanical reefer. These cars were enjoyable to build, although my first attempt at painting the multimark on the green newsprint car was unsuccessful due to poor interactions between  the Tamiya white paint and TruColor CP green.  Note to self: don't mix these paints on a model, it won't end well. For most of the cars I used either Tamiya TS-33 dull red spray cans (these are becoming a rare commodity in Canada these days) for the CP boxcar red, based on a recommendation from Coquihalla Man .  For the action red and action green I used TruColor CP action red and action green with good results.  The silver mechanical refrigerator was pai...

This past weekend the annual Vancouver Train Exposition (VTEX) was held at the PNE Forum in Vancouver.  I attended and had an enjoyable time catching up with people, browsing the sales tables and visiting the various layouts and displays around the show.   Talking with my friend Al (who happens to also be the chair of the Canadian National Railways Historical Association  cnrha.ca  ) he mentioned he had some CN ore cars from the late Ron Keith collection - my friend Rene has a nice post about Ron < here >. I only met Ron a few times but his scratchbuilding work was outstanding. Al pulled a couple of the ore cars from a case and showed me.  They were scratchbuilt models of CN drop bottom gondolas used in ore service.  As usual for Ron's models they were very nicely rendered representatives of the cars, complete with interior details and full underframe brake gear.  Al said he didn't have a use for them and asked if I might have a spot for the...

Another batch of cars from the CP Boundary Sub made it's way onto my workbench this week.  I used a mix of oil paint, lacquer and acrylic washes as well as some selective Pan Pastel weathering on these cars.  Always fun to play around with techniques, although when it is someone else's equipment it is better to stick with what you know than try something completely new.   Most of the cars are lightly to moderately weathered with the exception of the coal hoppers and OCS  tank car.  Those cars got a bit heavier weathering to reflect their hard service.  The weathering doesn't really come out as well as it should in photos but I'm happy with how they turned out.  I may have to detoxify after all the CP equipment passing across my workbench with a good dose of CN stuff.  

In 1984 CN rebuilt 60 boxcars for livestock service.  Their existing fleet of stock cars was on it's last legs as much of the historic livestock trade was now hauled by truck.  These cars had opening cut in their sides and slats added to give ventilation.  With the closing of the Winnipeg Stock Yards in 1989 the need for livestock cars ended and these cars were scrapped or used in work service.  I can honestly say that I never actually saw one of these cars in service.  That said I always thought they were an interesting prototype and I have toyed with building a model of one just for kicks.   Kaslo Shops has released a 3D printed version of these cars in HO Scale and I built one for their box art.  This  is the first of many planned releases of 40 and 50 foot boxcars, many of which are unique prototypes like these cars and unlikely to be available as RTR cars.   The kit comes with a one piece body and separate underframe along with...

The Pacific Great Eastern (PGE) was the name of the railway that ran from North Vancouver to northern British Columbia.  It was renamed the British Columbia Railway in 1972.  The PGE/BCR primarily focused on forest products throughout it's network.  To serve the numerous lumber and paper mills they amassed a sizable fleet of boxcars, flatcars and bulkhead flatcars (as well as numerous centerbeam flatcars as the BCR) and woodchip cars. In 1966 the PGE ordered 100 50' newspirnt cars from Hawker Siddeley for service on their system.  The cars had plug doors that gave a smooth interior to lessen damage to the newsprint rolls they hauled.  The cars were delivered with roofwalks and high mounted brakewheels.  In the 1970's many of these cars were rebuilt without roofwalks and repainted into the BCOL scheme in both light and dark green paint.   Kaslo Shops  recently released both the as delivered and rebuilt versions of these cars as kits.  I w...

Put this one in the category of 'oddball projects". I was asked to build and paint a Kaslo Shops Distributing 48' Manac refrigerated trailer that was commonly used in eastern Canada in the 90's and 2000's.  The trailer is well designed and was a quick assembly project.  It took longer to paint and mask the trailer than to build it. I painted the trailer white with aluminum roof and trim.  The underbody was painted light grey as that was the colour used on most prototype trailers.  I am quite happy with the paint separations and had minimal overspray to deal with as I painted the masking with a coat of white paint to seal the edges.  The tire rims were painted white and I used Vallejo Air Tire Black to hand paint the tires.      It will be hard to justify a future trailer on my layout, but I am lobbying Kaslo to do 1970s and 1980s trailers.  We'll see if I am successful in this down the road (pardon the pun).