CN Woodchip cars


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.  There were a couple of printing glitches that needed filling, but these were quite minor in the grand scheme.  I made some additional fixes after the cars were primed for painting.

Best guess on underframe piping.  I was forwarded some underframe photos after I completed these cars and they are generally correct in set up.  Hopefully the HO scale carmen on the layout will pass these cars

I made underframe brake gear using my best guesstimate based on photos.  These cars had visible brake piping with U shaped hangers.  I used 0.015" phosphor bronze wire, Accurail brake levers trimmed from 40' boxcar brake gear for the brake gear.  I used staples that were formed to represent the U shaped hangers.  While not 100% accurate they are reasonable representations.  

The NSC car with Tamiya Red Oxide Fine Surface Primer compared to a boxcar with TLT CN Red #12 - Pretty close to my eye.  I may have to stock up on this for future projects.  
Transcona built car with TLT CN Red #12 over Tamiya White Fine Surface Primer.  We'll see if the two cars are noticeably different in final appearance.

Mattieu Lachance forwarded some photos of the interior of the NSC cars showing they were black with red doors on the interior.  After some thought I cut some 0.005" styrene and airbrushed them red.
Airbrushed black interior of the NSC car
I would not have thought NSC would go to the trouble of painting the interiors of the cars, particularly with red doors.  However the prototype photo doesn't lie so I added this interesting detail.  

I decided to try some different primer on one of the cars.  I found some Tamiya Oxide Red Fine Surface Primer that looked very close to the boxcar red used on CN freight cars.  I primed the NSC car with this primer and it goes on beautifully as most Tamiya paint products do.  I painted the Transcona car with White Fine Surface Primer to (hopefully) get a slightly different tone to the car paint.  

The NSC car got a coat of black paint on the interior, and as discussed above I made some doors using styrene painted red as per the prototype photo.  I used Sook Wang double sided tape to mount the doors.  It looks pretty sharp to my eye.

I used Future (or whatever they call it now) for the areas that decals were being applied to.   The decals are accurate for both car types and go one nicely.  The CN noodle and "CN Rail" on the car sides take more work as they have to go over and around the side posts.  I used prototype photos as a guide and sliced the decals at the appropriate locations to go over the posts. I used a spare set of Black Cat CN decals to slice up to get the sides of the posts covered.  This was an involved process but if you proceed carefully it isn't that difficult, just time consuming.  The end result was an accurately lettered car.  



Another gloss coat was applied to seal the decals, and after that I used Tamiya TS-80 Matt clear spray on the car.  I put Kadee 158 couplers weathered with Vallejo Game Effects dry rust and weathered wheelsets in the trucks.  I'll hold off weathering these cars until I locate photos of what they looked like back in the early 1980's.  Most online photos are from the 1990's or later so I don't want to have them over done for my time frame.  Kudos to Kaslo Shops and Mattieu Lachance for getting these cars to market.  They fill a large void in Canadian freight cars.   


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