The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

Kaslo Shops  has announced 3D printed kits for woodchip cars built by NSC and CN Transcona .  These have not been offered previously and are welcomed by CN modellers.  I was offered the opportunity by Kaslo Shops to build and paint a pair of these kits for the box art of the kits.  While these cars never(?) operated on the Hudson Bay Railway I jumped at the chance to build these new offerings.  I'll come up with some reason to have woodchip cars, maybe servicing my future paper plant.   The kits themselves are completely 3D printed and come with everything except the trucks and couplers.  And they come with custom decals for these cars.  Overall it is a well designed kit that goes together quickly.   I did note some print grain on the car sides.  While not objectionable I elected to sand the sides to lessen the grain.  600 grit sandpaper trimmed to fit the various widths of the panels made quick work of this task.  T...

Previously I had worked on building a fleet of rebuilt CN F7 units < here >.  A total of 3 units (2 F7Au and one F7Bu) were completed and I moved onto other projects.  Recently I stumbled across another partly finished F7B and decided that I should get it wrapped up.   I bought this model as part of an ABA set of Kato drive Stewart F7 units from Dan Kirlin's hobby shop in Winnipeg circa 1994 (!?!).  In previous decades I had added lift rings, a winterization hatch and had drilled out the various grab iron and railing mounting locations to the model.  I used an OMI rooftop cooling coil for the coil seen on the prototype.  These are long out of production and impossible to find now (made out of unobtanium), but Precision Scale has a plastic cooling coil that replaces this one.   As well, I had modified the fuel tank skirting and fuel tank to reflect the prototype arrangement.  I then let the model marinate in the box for years due to...