Gondola pole load

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 was used for weathering and I used the browns and blacks to replicate the bark on the posts.  I think it worked well.  

Once the oil paint was dry I inserted four of them into the holes and glued them in place.  I cut the dowel to a scale 60' length (guesstimated) so they would fit comfortably in the gondola.  I then glued the dowel with a hot glue gun inside the posts.  I tried to keep the glue as minimal as possible with varying success.  Going forward I will likely use wood glue instead.  


I glued four more vertical posts on the side of the load and let it dry.  Once everything was set up I used 0.008" wire strung between the posts to secure the load.  I used a black felt marker to darken the wire.  I twisted the wired to represent the wire used on the prototype loads.  Some loads have a piece of wood that was used to twist the wire but I couldn't get a piece of scale wood to stay put.  That is something I still need to figure out.   

This is a quick easy load to make.  One additional thing I may need to figure out is how to taper the pole load.  That will be load 2.0.






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