The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

Kaslo Shops  has announced 3D printed kits for woodchip cars built by NSC and CN Transcona .  These have not been offered previously and are welcomed by CN modellers.  I was offered the opportunity by Kaslo Shops to build and paint a pair of these kits for the box art of the kits.  While these cars never(?) operated on the Hudson Bay Railway I jumped at the chance to build these new offerings.  I'll come up with some reason to have woodchip cars, maybe servicing my future paper plant.   The kits themselves are completely 3D printed and come with everything except the trucks and couplers.  And they come with custom decals for these cars.  Overall it is a well designed kit that goes together quickly.   I did note some print grain on the car sides.  While not objectionable I elected to sand the sides to lessen the grain.  600 grit sandpaper trimmed to fit the various widths of the panels made quick work of this task.  T...

Previously I had worked on building a fleet of rebuilt CN F7 units < here >.  A total of 3 units (2 F7Au and one F7Bu) were completed and I moved onto other projects.  Recently I stumbled across another partly finished F7B and decided that I should get it wrapped up.   I bought this model as part of an ABA set of Kato drive Stewart F7 units from Dan Kirlin's hobby shop in Winnipeg circa 1994 (!?!).  In previous decades I had added lift rings, a winterization hatch and had drilled out the various grab iron and railing mounting locations to the model.  I used an OMI rooftop cooling coil for the coil seen on the prototype.  These are long out of production and impossible to find now (made out of unobtanium), but Precision Scale has a plastic cooling coil that replaces this one.   As well, I had modified the fuel tank skirting and fuel tank to reflect the prototype arrangement.  I then let the model marinate in the box for years due to...

CN 157188 eastbound through Roblin Manitoba in 1993.  Marc Simpson Photo CN 157064 in it's almost finished form.  This is a car that is going to need a repaint soon. CN 156053 is a less weathered car that was recently shopped. CN ordered 700 65'6" IL gondolas from Hawker Siddeley and NSC between 1966 and 1972.  These cars were used in general service with some receiving a removable roof.  These were often seen in steel service, scrap metal and hauling hydro poles among many things.   These have been on my build list for many years.  Originally I planned to scratchbuild these cars but Kaslo Shops ( https://www.kasloshops.com/ ) has made this task much easier by releasing a 3D printed version of both the HST and NSC cars.  Each type has a number of differences that only become obvious when you look at the cars in detail.   The kit comes with a mix of etched parts and 3D printed parts.  Everything is nicely rendered.   The ki...

A friend (Mark W.) sent me a care package a while ago with a mountain of CN negatives and slides along with a bunch of paperwork related to CN.  Amongst these papers were a stack of Canadian Car and Foundry Bulletins for CN passenger cars and CC&F tank cars.  The passenger cars will get scanned and uploaded on the www.cnrha.ca website at some point, but the CC&F tank cars are not strictly CN related.   The drawings are for 6700, 8000 and 10,000 gallon tank cars built for Imperial Oil in 1929 and 1930 with IOX reporting marks.  These are pretty interesting documents with detailed elevation plans, detailed descriptions of the various parts of the cars as well as prototype photos.   Not only are they very useful for those wanting to model IOX tank cars, they are interesting historical documents.  If anyone is interested in getting higher resolution versions of these plans contact me via the blog.    

 Recently my wife and I purchased a light box for photographing my models and her hand made cards ( Cards.by.Amara ).  The light box is big enough to fit an HO 85' passenger car so it will work well for most model photography. The light box comes with several back drops in neutral grey, black, white and tan/beige.  I played around with the different backdrops and a recently weathered CN PSC Caboose.  I must say that I am partial to the black backdrop, with the grey and white 2nd and 3rd.  In this application I think the tan/beige doesn't work well.   The light box is easy to set up and the built in LED lights have variable tone and brightness controls.  I see good potential for this for my model photography. Neutral grey back drop.  It's okay but I may have to brighten the lighting in Photoshop Black backdrop: I really like how the red-orange pops with this back drop White back drop: this will likely need some work in Photoshop to be useable ...