The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

My friend Mark P. took a lot of photos during his time working in northern Manitoba.  They are fertile modelling inspiration, and a couple of shots caught my eye.  A couple of ACFX tank cars were photographed in Churchill at the locomotive fueling area.  They were older style cars that were quite interesting in appearance.  A bit of sleuthing with the scans and Google told me that they were former LPG tank cars that had been converted to general service tank cars.  The high resolution scans showed that the cars had been rebuilt in the early 1970's and were still in use into the mid 1980's in my modelling area.  I had to model them.   All the bits I need to do a converted LPG to general service tank car - Atlas 11K gallon tank car, Yarmouth Model Works etched platform and spare Walthers tank car parts. Both Atlas and Kadee make this style of LPG car in HO, so I picked up a couple of them to do the conversion.  One has a top platform and railin...

The CN aluminum tank hopper (and CP aluminum and steel cars as well) were one of those seemingly forgotten freight cars that everyone saw for years but never photographed.  They were built in the mid 1960's between the well known slabsided hoppers and the later cylindrical hoppers with features of both car types.  They had flat or peaked roofs and rounded car sides, with the aluminum cars being promoted by Alcan as a market for aluminum.   Aluminum turned out to have issues with corrosion, particularly where it was mated with steel or other metal. CN also purchased aluminum cylindrical hoppers for grain service, but CP stayed with steel for future car orders.  CN rostered several orders of 4 and 8 hatch aluminum tank hoppers (http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=cn361177&o=cn), while CP took delivery of multiple orders of 4 and 8 hatch cars in both steel and aluminum versions (http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=cp386466...