The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

CN had a very large fleet of 40' steel boxcars that I have previously written about previously.  One car that I overlooked in that post was the fleet of Hutchins flat steel roofed cars.  There were 1000 10' IH cars with dreadnaught ends and Hutchins flat steel roofs in the 471000-471999 series delivered in 1937 from Eastern Car Company.  I had a Sylvan Scale Models (now offered by Yarmouth Models) Hutchins roof and an Intermountain 10'IH car.  Now what car to model? By the early 1980's CN was removing roofwalks from their boxcars in a willy nilly manner.  Some got them removed when they were repainted or repaired, others kept the roofwalks to retirement.  Using photos as a guide is a must for anyone modelling the 1970's and on. I wanted to model a car with the roofwalk removed.  Richard Yaremko has a good prototype shot in his Canadian Railcar Pictorial Volume 2 of 421856 (former 471039) in the CN tilted wafer "Serves All Canada" maple leaf scheme....

The parts on their sprues prior to being separated My friend Mike M surprised me with test prints of the parts for the CN rebuilt 8 hatch ice reefers.  The parts turned out pretty well, only a few tweaks are needed.  As a bonus the parts fit between the underframe cross members on the first try, which actually surprised me a bit since everything was scaled from photos.   I need to adjust the fuel tank a bit as it looks like it rides a bit too low - either it isn't sitting properly or it is needing some adjustment to the vertical height.   Next up is figuring out how to do the doors and refrigeration unit.  This is starting to look promising.

  3D printing has come a long way in a very short time.  Previously most production was coarse with striated prints that needed a lot of sanding and preparation to make a useable model.  The latest generation of resin printers has changed all of that.   Briggs Models ( www.briggsmodels.ca ) announced a while back that they were going to produce CN 52' Hawker Siddelley welded gondolas in their HO line.  I jumped at the opportunity to acquire a few of these kits as these gondolas were in regular service to Flin Flon hauling concentrate and other stuff.   I got an email that the kits were available so I ordered 5 kits from the website.  It was straightforward and I received a well packed box with the kits in sealed bags.  A few back and forth messages to Jeff Briggs got me a few specifics about the kits and off I went.  He indicated that the instructions will be posted to the website in the near term.  That said these are pretty s...