The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

CN operated a sizable fleet of mechanical refrigerator cars from the mid 1960's through to the mid 1990's with some cars operating into the mid 2000's. Most of these cars have since been replaced by mechanical reefer containers.  Hawker Siddeley constructed 75 mechanical refrigerator cars in 1966, initially in the 231100-231174 series.  Later in 1967/68 50 cars were renumbered into the 233000-233049 series.  I am unsure of why this was done, but CN had a major freight car renumbering program in the late 1960s that can make your head spin trying to figure out.   The cars were delivered in the noodle paint scheme with a silver body and blue door to denote the cars use in meat service.  Later on some cars had silver painted doors, likely allowing their use in general refrigerator service.   Kaslo Shops has brought out this car type both with and without roof walks.  I built these two cars for their box art, 231152 for the roof walk version with ...

A well weathered CN 1929 boxcar in Winnipeg, on its way to the Winnipeg Railway Museum circa 1995; if only I had the foresight to measure the brake gear when I had the chance... I have wrapped up a long dormant boxcar project.  While digging through my stash of freight cars I found a Kaslo Shops Distributing Canadian National 40 foot 1929 single sheath boxcar in a box, assembled (not sure if it was me or something I bought at a train show)  but unpainted.  I decided to remedy that situation.   Side view of the brake rigging - I need to find a museum with one of these cars to measure and photograph! Before I got too far I had to address an issue with the brake rigging. On the prototype there was a clevis, crank, chain and anchor set up that I have never seen done in model form. I finally came across a few prototype slides in my collection with clear enough views of this arrangement to make an attempt at representing it. An Intermountain part along with some scrat...

I have been on a bit of a Canadian Pacific bent as of late.  I have been working on a number of Kaslo Shops kits for the CP Hawker Siddeley 50 foot boxcar fleet; specifically 2 door rod and 4 door rod newsprint cars both with and without roofwalks, 50 foot autopart boxcars with and without roofwalks, and a Hawker Siddeley 50 foot mechanical reefer. These cars were enjoyable to build, although my first attempt at painting the multimark on the green newsprint car was unsuccessful due to poor interactions between  the Tamiya white paint and TruColor CP green.  Note to self: don't mix these paints on a model, it won't end well. For most of the cars I used either Tamiya TS-33 dull red spray cans (these are becoming a rare commodity in Canada these days) for the CP boxcar red, based on a recommendation from Coquihalla Man .  For the action red and action green I used TruColor CP action red and action green with good results.  The silver mechanical refrigerator was pai...

This past weekend the annual Vancouver Train Exposition (VTEX) was held at the PNE Forum in Vancouver.  I attended and had an enjoyable time catching up with people, browsing the sales tables and visiting the various layouts and displays around the show.   Talking with my friend Al (who happens to also be the chair of the Canadian National Railways Historical Association  cnrha.ca  ) he mentioned he had some CN ore cars from the late Ron Keith collection - my friend Rene has a nice post about Ron < here >. I only met Ron a few times but his scratchbuilding work was outstanding. Al pulled a couple of the ore cars from a case and showed me.  They were scratchbuilt models of CN drop bottom gondolas used in ore service.  As usual for Ron's models they were very nicely rendered representatives of the cars, complete with interior details and full underframe brake gear.  Al said he didn't have a use for them and asked if I might have a spot for the...