The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

Put this one in the category of 'oddball projects". I was asked to build and paint a Kaslo Shops Distributing 48' Manac refrigerated trailer that was commonly used in eastern Canada in the 90's and 2000's.  The trailer is well designed and was a quick assembly project.  It took longer to paint and mask the trailer than to build it. I painted the trailer white with aluminum roof and trim.  The underbody was painted light grey as that was the colour used on most prototype trailers.  I am quite happy with the paint separations and had minimal overspray to deal with as I painted the masking with a coat of white paint to seal the edges.  The tire rims were painted white and I used Vallejo Air Tire Black to hand paint the tires.      It will be hard to justify a future trailer on my layout, but I am lobbying Kaslo to do 1970s and 1980s trailers.  We'll see if I am successful in this down the road (pardon the pun).

Canadian National Railways had a massive railway network that had extensive passenger service well into the 1970's.  When steam locomotives were being replaced by diesels, unlike many other railways CN elected to use separate steam generator units (SGU) for secondary and branchline trains.  This was to allow freight units to be used on these trains instead of dedicated passenger service units.   Between 1955 and 1957 CN ordered 94 SGU from CC&F (15400-448, 1958), GMD (15450-479, 1959) and NSC (15480-494, 1960), each with a different configuration.  These cars served in CN passenger train service through to the divestment of CN's passenger services into VIA Rail Canada in 1977. These cars continued in VIA service to the end of steam heated passenger cars in 1996 when they were retired.  Over the years a few options for modeling these cars were available including resin and brass, particularly several different versions of the CC&F and NSC (and maybe ...