The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

I stumbled across the prototype photo of a work service boxcar above and found that it was a perfect match for the True Line Trains 10'IH boxcar model.  I have quite a few of these cars and I had one that was a duplicate road number. Plugging the original holes with styrene rod.  The rod is slightly larger than the hole so some solvent cement makes quick work of the rod Redrilled hole locations for the ladders.  It looks better with the ladder remounted One issue with the first runs of these cars were the side ladders were too far inboard of the ends.  I popped the ladders off and plugged the holes with styrene rod.  These were trimmed and sanded smooth.  I found that Vallejo Air 71.105 Brown or 71.084 Fire Red are close to the factory paint colour.  Once the car is weathered you can't see any difference in the paint.  These cars were so filthy that there is more dirt than paint on them.   I stripped the road number and a few other incorrect (for this car) lettering areas on th

I built a pair of CN 66' gondolas < here > and decided I needed a load for them.  I shot one of these gondolas with a load of poles in 1992 (in the photo above) that I thought would be a fairly easy to build load.  The first thing I needed to sort out was how to make the poles.   I thought about using skewers but they are too small in diameter to be reasonable.  While tooling around in a dollar store I stumbled across a package of wood dowels that scaled out to 12" diameter, roughly appropriate for HO scale.  I picked up a few packages of the dowels and had my starting point.   I also needed to come up with how to mount the poles so they would be removable.  A small piece of thin plywood forms the load base.  I trimmed the I drilled a series of holes in the plywood to insert some round toothpicks to represent the vertical side posts used to hold the poles in place.   I needed to figure out how to represent the bark that was seen on the posts.  I had some oil paint that w

CN 56611 at Hope, BC, summer 1999 Pre-weathering view of the cars. Thanks to the generosity of a friend I was able to purchase a trio of OMI 30 yard Austin Western side dump cars that were originally part of the late Stafford Swain's collection.  The models were painted by John Morris but not decaled so needed some extra work.   Canadian National had a variety of side dump car types, with the 30 yard design from Austin Western being one of them.  CN ordered roughly 200+/- cars between 1951 and 1957 from Eastern Car Company who built them under license from Austin Western.   The cars are close to the CN 30 yard cars with some differences in the end platforms.  I decided to leave them as they were since I didn't want to mess with John's expert painting.  I didn't notice until I was looking at photos for decal placement so they will pass muster for most people.  Before I started decaling I applied thinned Vallejo gloss varnish to the areas to be lettered.  This gives a smo