Expanding Operational Possibilities

My friend and fellow layout blogger John R has an interesting post on how he's tweaked his layout concept to incorporate a greater variety of operation off his staging tracks. This is a bit similar to thinking I've been doing -- I've always been interested in both ore and pulpwood operations, though they're a little bit exotic and non-generic to include in many layouts.

Nevertheless, I've worked on both ore and pulpwood projects over the years, and in fact I designed several spurs on my layout that could load pulpwood -- for whatever reason, I never quite got those spurs or pulpwood cars incorporated into my JMRI operation files. I started to do this over the weekend.

The Walthers SIECO pulpwood cars are some of the nicest models and widely-used prototypes out there, used throughout the heartland and the southeast. Walthers never brought out models for all the prototype road names that these cars carry or carried, although I've collected a good many of the available models. Walthers briefly offered cast urethane pulpwood loads for these cars as well, which are hard to find, and they're cast in black material, so they need a fair amount of paint work. Here's a urethane load I recently found on eBay and painted, mounted on a Southern car.

I did a lot with ore car models that were available 40 years ago. Here's a pair of Roundhouse cars that I redid from models I found at swap meets. I added pellet extensions to both of them from styrene following a Bill Schaumburg article in a very old RMC. The C&NW car was done with Herald King decals available 40 years ago. The Milwaukee car was a Walthers special run.

In addition to the pellet extensions, as part of that 40 years ago project, I Dremeled off the factory coupler pockets on the Roundhouse metal underframes, drilled new mounting holes, and mounted Kadee short shank couplers to give the cars a more prototypical spacing. The Milwaukee car has also very recently had its trucks replaced with sideframes from the new Walthers ore car models. You can see the big difference with the CNW car on the right, which has the stock Roundhouse sideframes.

Not long ago I found the C Vision Vintage Iron Ore Railroads DVD, which has one sequence of a Milwaukee Road all-rail ore train in upper Michigan. This had the usual pooled Milwaukee and CNW ore jennies, but it also showed B&LE ore cars that had retained the B&LE heralds but had been restenciled for C&NW reporting marks and numbers. It turns out that in the mid 1970s, C&NW acquired about 60 ex B&LE cars for this service. I had some factory painted AHM style ore cars on hand, and I did my usual modification to body mount couplers and bush the truck mounting holes for screw-mounted trucks.

I touched up the bare plastic parts and patched the paint for decals. I'm waiting for C&NW ore car decals from Circus City Decals to finish the project.

I still need to run some test trains to determine exactly how I can incorporate ore cars in my operations.