The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

For years one of the projects that has lurked in the back of my mind was the CN 222600 series mechanical reefers that were rebuilt from CN's fleet of 8 hatch ice reefers. These mechanical reefers were staples on the Hudson Bay passenger train from the 1960's through 1983. CN rebuilt a significant portion of their 8 hatch ice reefer fleet into mechanical reefers in the 1960's as these were relatively new cars (the last cars were built in the late 1950's) that were obsolete due to the advent of mechanical refrigeration.   The rebuilding process included plating over the roof hatches, adding full height plug doors, underslung genset, fuel tank, battery box and other equipment along with an A/C unit on one of the doors. The 222600 series cars also had steam lines for use in passenger service. CN also converted other cars with a 5' tall plug door. Other similar cars were in the 220xxx, 224xxx and 225xxx series, and likely others as well. CN's freight car renumbering ...

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 ...

I have added a page for kits and models for sale that I would like to send to a new home.  It will be updated as things are sold and I find new treasures that become surplus to my needs.  You can find the kits for sale page link at the top of the page under the title block.  

I'll do a bit of cross posting here.  I had an article about building a layout for the Quebec Iron and Titanium Railway in eastern Quebec published in the Model Railroad Hobbyist online magazine.  It has both prototype and modelling related stuff so is a bit of a cross over between my modelling and prototype blogs.  You can find the article link on my other blog here:   https://ageologistchasingtrains.blogspot.com/2022/05/quebec-iron-and-titanium-havre-st.html Alternatively you can go straight to the MRH article here:  https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/quebec-iron-titanium-railway-12353820?pid=1332635156 If anyone actually builds a layout based on the QIT I would be very interested to see their results.

 Three M420 lead a northbound mixed train.  I'm sure this must have happened somewhere at least once in the real world, right?

The December 2020 issue of Railroad Model Hobbyist 's Running Extra magazine has an article I wrote about building a VIA Rail (ex CN exx Canadian Northern) Colonist combine.  I built this car from a BGR Group kit (unfortunately now out of production) resin kit.   The article covers the building process and some of the changes I made to accurately model VIA 7189.  Hopefully this will be of some use for other modellers building these kits.