Making up for lost time

Hello Everyone

Well as I promised there has been a lot of model building and I need to get them on the blog so you all can see what I have been building.

This Chicago Great Western gondola is an old brass car I found in a box of broken trains I used for parts.  I have had it for several years and one day I took it out of my projects cabinet and decided to create a car to carry a load of structural steel.  There are Kadee couplers and Athearn diecast sprung trucks under the car along with Plastruct, Selley Custsom Finishes, and Cal-scale detail parts.  It is painted gloss black with Microscale and Champion Decals finished with Testors Dullcote.  The Chicago Great Western is a railroad often overlooked by modelers and I am guilty of the same.  With so many other roads in the Midwest some of us forget there were unsung heroes who moved the freight right under our noses and we did not recognize their existence.  This is the first of two CGW cars I had planned to build. 

This Chicago and North Western boxcar came to be after I watched a CVision video showing a C&NW train passing through Peshtigo, Wisconsin.  I noticed a boxcar with these same markings in the train and I decided to search through my decals to see if I had the correct ones to make a similar car.  Well I did and here is the car.  The car is another badly worn out Athearn boxcar found at a local train show for a couple of dollars.  I stripped it down to the bare metal and completely rebuilt the car using Plastruct, Selley Custom Finishes, Cal-Scale, and Walthers detail parts.  C&NW had several of these 40-foot PS-1 boxcars on their lines throughout the Midwest and Plains states serving grain elevators and wood products customers.  Many began to be rebuilt and upgraded in the late 1950's after the Clinton, Iowa car shops were opened. This car will operate on my 3-rail layout and is equipped with Lionel die-cast sprung trucks.

Thank you for visiting the blog, and more will be coming soon so stay tuned.