The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

I recently completed a 6 car set of the newly released Kaslo Shops Distributing Marine Industries 51'6" IL bulkhead flatcars in several variations.  They are nice kits and go together well.  You can do as much or as little underframe detailing as you want.  I did the full underframe detailing on a few and just installed basic underframe details on the others.    The etched ladders and other bits are very nice and are close to scale size.  The cars go together quickly and the parts have good fit.  The center post cars are a bit tricky to get the posts vertical in all directions, I would recommend using a glue that has a longer working time than CA so you can get everything lined up.   The cars are quite light and finding space to add weight will be challenging.  There is space in the centersill for adding weight, and you could also add some weight behind the side sills.  These cars may need to  have permanent loads to get them ...

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 w...