50-Year Old Scratchbuilding Projects

At least from the time I was six or seven years old, I was "scratchbuilding" model train items from shirt cardboard and masking tape -- my dad worked for a company that made the tape and brought home lots of free samples. Naturally, I would have preferred the latest in the Lionel catalog, but what I could cut out with scissors and tape together was certainly better than nothing. By the time I was in the ninth grade, I seem to have graduated to thinner white poster stock like you can still find at Walgreen's and similar places, and I think I was using Elmer's to glue it together.

Somewhere around that time, my family visited Washington, DC, and when I got home I made a roughly HO scale model of the Senate monorail car that took the senators from the office building to the Capitol via a subway. That has long since disappeared, sorry to say. But in high school, I was in bed for some weeks with mono. During that time, with nothing else to do, I mass-produced three HO models of PRR H36 hoppers using the thin poster stock, some wood shapes, and Elmer's glue. These seem to be the earliest models I've built that survive.

One thing I still needed to learn about scratchbuilding, and that took me at least a dozen more years to figure out, was the need for a solid and reliable way to mount trucks and couplers, as well as the need for proper weight. Some of my earliest models have stayed in the purgatory box pending resolution of these problems. Recently I pulled out one of the high school PRR H36s. In a previous effort, I filled in nooks and crannies in the chassis with buckshot. More recently, I found a way to mount Kadee coupler pockets to the chassis with screws, and just now I used some washers from the miscellaneous parts box to make bolsters. Here's the result:

The car is pretty beat up from 52 years in the purgatory box, and you can see where I pulled off the crude ladders I'd made in high school. You can also see the Walthers decals, which were awful but all that was available in 1965. I plan to add angle stock to the corners, new ladders, and touch up the paint, but leave the Walthers decals as a way to stay in touch with my aspirations.

Next is a car I did maybe half a dozen years later. By then I'd mastered using basswood roof, floor, and end block stock to build up a car following typical articles in MR and RMC of the time. This is a Milwaukee Road car from a long-vanished RMC:

The overall process of decaling took longer, and for whatever reason, I never quite got around to adding trucks and couplers, so it never ran on any layout. With the PRR H36, I decided to fix it up and make it run. For now, both this car and the hopper have temporary junk box trucks and Accumate couplers that I'll replace with my next trip to the hobby shop. I also need to replace the roof walk, probably with one from Tichy. Both cars are a little short on weight, but I think they'll do.

I gave them a test run, which considering it took them 50 years to actually operate, was very satisfying.