Comet Freezer Progress

 ...and a Twelve Days Trail Drive update!

The white body without sides is the Baby Ruth car.  In my color tests I found I got a better match to the original sides when painting the orangey-red over white.  The gray car will have white ends and they're actually primed white though they're hard to see in these shots.  The undersides of both cars will be black and once the primer is cured a bit longer I'll tape off the body and hit both with rattle can black.  The roof of the gray-primed car will be Tuscan Red so it will need a second masking before that color will be airbrushed on.

If you look closely at the second image (right-click and open in a new tab to see it much larger) you'll see my simplified brake rigging.  I tried to make brake levers from styrene and attach it to the center sill, along with a clevis formed from half a Tichy turnbuckle, my usual approach.  Neither worked very well, and in the interest of time I just bent wire and glued it into a hole in the sill.  Done and dusted.  Another simplifying step was using the original grab irons pulled from the Baby Ruth car as roof walk supports at the end of each car.

Okay, on to the update.  These cars are coming along nicely and are on track to be complete by Christmas.  The cabooses are not as far along but could be ready if - and its a big IF - I really push through and make good progress each day.  I'd rather not push too hard.  I'm really pleased with how these projects are all coming together, but I'm also taking time to enjoy the seasonal fun like decorating the house, making treats and playing games with my family.  We're getting nice sunny weather and I like puttering about in my garden, tidying the beds.  So I'm planning on extending this personal challenge into the actual Twelve Days of Christmas, with January 6, 2021 the new target date.

Look for an end-of-year review and resolutions post soon.  Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a blessed holiday season.

Questions Answered - Model Railroad Research

I really enjoy model railroad research.  Note I didn't say prototype research - that's a related discipline that often overlaps, but it isn't quite the same.  Sometimes you can't find any prototype information, or the book that might contain that nugget you seek isn't in your library or is too darn expensive.  That's when turning to the previous versions of the model might help.  It is also fun to look into the history of the hobby.

When I was in seminary I learned about researching textual variants in ancient fragments of scripture.  Usually you went with the oldest known text, whether it was a papyrus fragment or potsherd inscription.  But often you'd find a greater weight of evidence in say, vellum copies.  Though the papyrus may be older, it may not carry the same authority because there are so many copies of the variant text.  Which do you choose as the basis for translation?

So too with model railroad freight cars.  When a manufacturer, long out of business, produced a freezer* ages ago and advertised they used the car builders diagrams, then that's a pretty good source.  But when another manufacturer makes a copy and varies the details, like using a different color scheme or using a different roof type, and they produce thousands of them, which then get copied by other manufacturers, what do you do?  With no actual prototype data available, which source do you trust to build your version of that freezer?

It is possible the second manufacturer chose to change the model based on their available dies for casting parts rather than incur the cost of making new ones.  Maybe they changed the color scheme to make it less gaudy in the hopes it might sell better.  Or maybe they didn't have much prototype data either!

Re-kitted freezer ready to rebuild.

For the two Comet freezers I'm building as of the writing of this post, I needed to know more before I could add better details.  What type of underframe?  Likely fishbelly.  Ladders or grabs?  Ladders. Et Cetera.  For the MDT car I had good prototype photos thanks to Eric Hansmann and other like-minded researchers.  But the Baby Ruth car?  Only one colorized image - the cover of Hendrickson's Billboard Refrigerator Cars book.  Ends, sides, ladders, underframe all visible in that image.  But what about the roof?  The hatches?

Here's where the kit helps out.  My car came to me already built - thankfully not too damaged and assembled well enough - but the original would have contained hints for the roof on the card from which you punched out the sides and ends (and hatches).  Enter eBay.  A quick search of previously sold items turned up an image that helped.

Read the fine print.  Use magnification if necessary.

Right there on the carrier sheet it says, "NO ROOF RIBS    RED SIDE LADDERS".  This note was obviously missed by many modelers who decided to put ribs up there anyway, as evinced by other eBay searches for this car, even the one I'm rebuilding.  But no matter.  In this great hobby we all get to make creative choices that suit our fancy and build models to our heart's content.

*I use the term freezer instead of the more common reefer for a couple reasons - for a while in the early days of this hobby it was the term de rigueur, like saying pike instead of layout.  But in my current NorCal context "reefer" also has a meaning that I don't care to reference.  I know, most readers of this blog know the difference; I just prefer "freezer", in the same way some men like to wear vests.