The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

I stumbled across the prototype photo of a work service boxcar above and found that it was a perfect match for the True Line Trains 10'IH boxcar model.  I have quite a few of these cars and I had one that was a duplicate road number. Plugging the original holes with styrene rod.  The rod is slightly larger than the hole so some solvent cement makes quick work of the rod Redrilled hole locations for the ladders.  It looks better with the ladder remounted One issue with the first runs of these cars were the side ladders were too far inboard of the ends.  I popped the ladders off and plugged the holes with styrene rod.  These were trimmed and sanded smooth.  I found that Vallejo Air 71.105 Brown or 71.084 Fire Red are close to the factory paint colour.  Once the car is weathered you can't see any difference in the paint.  These cars were so filthy that there is more dirt than paint on them.   I stripped the road number and a few other incor...

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...

CN 56611 at Hope, BC, summer 1999 Pre-weathering view of the cars. Thanks to the generosity of a friend I was able to purchase a trio of OMI 30 yard Austin Western side dump cars that were originally part of the late Stafford Swain's collection.  The models were painted by John Morris but not decaled so needed some extra work.   Canadian National had a variety of side dump car types, with the 30 yard design from Austin Western being one of them.  CN ordered roughly 200+/- cars between 1951 and 1957 from Eastern Car Company who built them under license from Austin Western.   The cars are close to the CN 30 yard cars with some differences in the end platforms.  I decided to leave them as they were since I didn't want to mess with John's expert painting.  I didn't notice until I was looking at photos for decal placement so they will pass muster for most people.  Before I started decaling I applied thinned Vallejo gloss varnish to the areas to be...

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...