More 3D doodling - CN rebuilt 8 hatch reefer Part 1

Mark Perry shot a string of CN 222600 series mechanical reefers in Thompson Manitoba in 1982.  These are the cars I will be building for my layout


Another rebuild with a short plug door; it might have been to clear the overhead ice racks.  They are no longer in use as the roof hatches on this car have been plated over

Beginning in the early 1960's CN started rebuilding some of it's relatively new 8 hatch ice reefers into mechanical reefers.  The roof hatches were removed and plated over, and a variety of plug doors were installed with many getting full height plug doors replacing their original doors.  Some cars kept their original plug doors, and based on photos no cars with swing doors kept them after rebuilding.

The numbering series were all over the place in the 22X000 series; www.nakina.net is your best place to try to unravel the complex numbering history of these cars.   

CN used 222600 series rebuilt reefers for service to Churchill as head end cars on passenger trains until 1983.  I need these cars for my layout, although I will move the loading point from Thompson to The Pas for more operational interest; if I left the loading point in Thompson these cars would never show up on my layout!

I have accumulated a pile of TLT 8 hatch reefer shells and cars over the years along with quite a few Funaro and Camerlengo CN 8 hatch reefer kits in a variety of configurations.  I'll keep a few 8 hatch reefers as ice reefers as they survived in various services until the late 1980's.  

I've started figuring out how to build these cars.  The car underbody details are challenging as to my knowledge no drawings exist and no cars are left.  Even detailed photos are challenging to find.  

Thanks to Richard Yaremko I have some good high resolution slide scans, and I also have a few slides in my collection of these cars.  Between these sources I started figuring out how to draw the underframe details.  

Since we know the size of the side panels on the model and prototype I scaled the generator, battery box and fuel tank using that dimension.  I drew this in HO scale so hopefully it will fit.  Constantly referencing photos while doodling got me to this point:


The red item is the fuel tank, gold item is the genset, dark green item is the battery box and the blue and red item is ductwork that is visible on some cars.  Other cars appear to have different ducting.  Having the ducting as a separate part should make modelling the variations relatively easy.  

Don't look for a lot of detail on the genset engine - I don't have anything to go from so a box will have to do for now.  If anyone has better photos (or even measurements!) please get in touch so I can improve this.  The nice thing with 3D CAD is that you can easily change things.  

I sent the parts to my friend Mike M. who has an Elagoo Mars (and new Saturn!) to have them printed for test fitting.  Mike has "volunteered" (more like I pressganged him) into drawing new car sides for the rebuilds as his CAD skills are much better than mine.  We'll see where we go with this in Part 2 once I have the test parts and hopefully new car sides.  


Comments

  1. Mike28 May 2021 at 13:23

    Now I see why they are so important to you for your layout.

    ReplyDelete

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