Passenger Fleet Color Choices

After badmouthing the garish red paint* on the combine in my previous post, I figured I'd better present my preferences, or at least the process for determining my choice.  I'm following a suggested scheme by Selley for their passenger cars.  I'll admit that when I first read it I dismissed it, but after searching and seeing what others had done I came back to it and embraced it.  It's basically this: roof - black or brown, sides and ends - Tuscan red, trucks and platform details - olive green, underbody and select details - black.  So, I pulled my colors I thought might work and began making color swatches on a sheet painted with the same primer I'm using on the cars.

Below, the choices I'm leaning towards.  Or, mellow traffic signals.  You decide.

*I should admit that many great passenger trains have been a bright red or similarly bold rosy hue.  John Allen's streamlined passenger train was painted Mandarin Red, as was his little combine that worked the branch line out of Gorre up to Daphetid.  Perhaps that was the inspiration for the little combine I found. 

Combine Countdown

Having finally put a coat of primer on the now-detailed Binkley Shorty Baggage, I can turn my full attention to the remaining car in the Milk & Mail trio, the Binkley Shorty Combine.  This car I purchased from an eBay listing that supported a model train club in Vermont, if memory serves.  Clearly someone put some time and effort into it, building an interior, shaping the roof and applying some sort of contour putty to it, then painting it a garish red and black.*  Still, time has not been kind to this car, and I must rebuild it and put it to work on the Ocali Creek.

This post is titled, "Combine Countdown" because I begin working on this car with a good idea of the sequence of events that now lay before me.  Having upgraded the baggage car - mostly the roof - I know the steps to take that will bring me closer to completion.  First was to clean away the detritus and damage to the roof so that I could rebuild it.  This was done a while ago as I was assessing what would need to be done to this and the other car.  

Now I could proceed to extend the clerestory roof edge down the bullnose - a challenge for any kit that requires you to shape the end manually, though Northeastern has a jig for their wood kits, but I digress.  I did this with HO scale 4"x4" styrene strip.  Warm the strip in your mouth a minute then roll it under a firm round object, like the handle of an Xacto knife.  Continue until it holds a curve similar to the roof.  This will make gluing it in place a great deal easier.  I cut a little divet off the end to let it snuggle up to the lower roof edge.  This isn't crucial, as plastic putty will fill any gaps - and boy are there gaps.

Up next, putty, sanding, and preparing parts for the clerestory roof screen.  Thanks for reading.

*Garish perhaps for a train car, but lovely for other things.  The lyrics to a song I once sang spring to mind: "Morning sun greets many banners on its westward track.  Fair to us above all others waves the red and black."

Truck Repair

No, not that kind of truck repair, unless you were thinking of the assemblies that sit beneath train cars, in which case, yes, that kind of truck repair.  Maybe rebuild is a better term.  Anyway, look at this:

The donor truck is a Selley passenger truck intended for their old time open platform shorty cars.  I have a few kits waiting to be built and have set aside some free-rolling MDC/Roundhouse old-time passenger trucks with metal wheels for those kits.  The Roundhouse trucks, to my eye, look better under the Selley cars.  Still, I don't want the Selley trucks to go to waste, even though the plastic wheels that came with would them qualify as pizza cutters, if they rolled well enough.

SO, I unsoldered the Selley trucks as best I could and though I lost a few I was able to get enough parts to make a pair.  I used the truck-tuner tool to ream a conical bearing in each side frame until Kadee ribbed-back wheel sets would fit and turn easily.  Then I "welded" the trucks back together using two-part Loctite Weld.

These trucks will run beneath the former-NP Fruit Car, intended to be run in the Morning Milk & Mail train on the Ocali Creek's Pine Branch.  I chose these Selley trucks for this car despite their difficulties in rebuilding them because they fit.  It really is a practical matter more than an aesthetic choice, though I like the look much more than the arch bar trucks intended for the car and used by the prototype.  In my fictional history, the OCRy got this car second hand and, as part of the rebuild, used some second-hand passenger trucks.  Such is the way on short lines with meager budgets.

Milk & Mail - Baggage Improvements

Making progress again on the Binkley Shorty Baggage.  Here are two images; the roof and its improvements, and the underbody detail.

Upgrades to the roof include a screen overlay and framing for the clerestory sides, simulated canvas covering for the roof, and drip strips over the doors.  Prior to these additions I also used square styrene stock to extend the clerestory overhang down along the curved ends of the roof.  This is a detail often missing from these cars where the modeler has to shape the bullnose ends.  Here the bullnose profile has been provided as a metal casting but it must be filed to match the width of the clerestory sides and the overhang profile extended somehow.  I precurved the styrene and attached it with cyanoacrylate adhesive.

The floor received an air tank made from dowel 'turned' in a drill and shaped with files to simulate the bands around the tank and reduce its size.  The kit came with a brass casting for the tank but I will use it on the combine.  I chose to add the brake cylinder and levers casting though the instructions don't call for it.  It is a Binkley/Red Ball part.

Next will be a little more work on the sides, adding the end railings, assembling the Walthers trucks, and priming.  After that I will apply a similar roof treatment and underbody detail to the combine.  I may just get these cars completed by Christmas...but I'm in no hurry, so we'll see.  Thanks for reading and following along with this project.

Is This Narrow Gauge?

 

Try your best to ignore the messy paint work and focus on the trucks.

Recently I began raiding my collection of rolling stock in order to see if I had any passenger trucks I could use for the Binkley combine and coach I've been rebuilding for the Morning Milk & Mail train.  But, I hear you say, I thought you already had trucks for these cars?  Yes, and no.  I had planned to use Selley trucks re-built with metal wheels but this is tricky work to unsolder them without damage.  The one set of Binkley trucks I have I had planned to use under the Binkley/Red Ball Fruit Car, and these have the beginnings of zinc rot showing.  Hence, the "robbing Peter to pay Paul" effort, hunting for trucks.

But that's not what this post is about.  My search led me to the Ulrich "Sierra" cars I had stashed away.  Back in 2001, when I was living with my wife in her parents' home with only an occasional kitchen table to use for modeling, I embarked on building these beautiful kits.  I nearly completed one car before we were able to move.  At that point life got busier, my modeling interests shifted and the cars were packed away until a few years later when I began painting one and building an interior for it.

That's as far as it got before we moved again (and again), and yet again more projects came and went.  That brings the story up to today.  See, I had always wondered if these Ulrich cars were too small for HO standard gauge.  The trucks somehow seemed too big, but I didn't have any point of reference other than photos of models  These cars aren't an exact match for the Sierra cars so often seen in Westerns and other TV shows, but they're close.  Still, they seemed too small.

A while back I stumbled on an orphaned HOn3 combine on eBay that I couldn't live without.  On close examination it seems to be a scratchbuilt car using styrene.  Really fine work, though the styrene has warped with age.  I think the trucks are Kemtron but I can't be sure.  So when I pulled out the Ulrich cars to look at their trucks I decided to do a little experiment.  Carefully removing the trucks from the scratchbuilt car, I set the Ulrich car onto them.  Bingo.  Now it looks right (see the photo at the head of this article).  That means I can now use the Ulrich trucks for the Binkley cars and once again pack away the Ulrich cars for the day I find some HOn3 trucks on which they can ride.

See for yourself the size similarity - the brown combine is the scratchbuild, the brightly colored coach is the Ulrich car.  Length isn't as indicative as width in determining an appropriate size for standard or narrow gauge.  In fact, the Florida Railway bought narrow gauge passenger equipment and set it on standard gauge trucks.  That looked as strange as the Ulrich cars on their standard gauge trucks, at least to my eye because the carbodies were too narrow for the trucks.  Other railroads took small standard gauge cars and placed the on narrow gauge trucks.  Again, this looks odd, but hey, there's a prototype for everything, if you look long enough.

Milk & Mail - Fruit Car Primed

With the completion of the sides, ends and roof details, I could prime the body for the Fruit Car.  I elected to upgrade the fascia and door track and add a slide bar but chose to keep the original door stop even though it is a bit oversized.  Whenever possible I like to use original kit parts.  For the damaged end I had to bend a new pair of railings and replace the broken two-part sill casting.  I covered the roof with tissue paper to represent canvas and replaced the roofwalk with 2x6 planks and 2x2 supports.

The underside was primed first with my usual Dark Walnut while the rest of the car received gray.  The trucks will be borrowed from one of the other two cars in this train, that is, either the shorty baggage or shorty combine from Binkley.  I will replace the wheelsets and reassemble the metal trucks with Loctite Weld.  I have been able to unsolder these vintage trucks with some success, but not without damage.  Next I'm going to try and simply cut them apart with a motor tool.  The original car rode on arch bars with flat springs.  I think it will fit better with a passenger consist on wood beam passenger trucks.

Milk & Mail - Fruit Car Underframe

After describing the project overview, I decided to begin working on the Fruit Car first.  No particular reason, just the whim of the muse.  I began by deciding how much detail I wanted to add to the underside.  Here's where I landed:

This amount of detail seems sufficient to indicate brake gear.  I'm always hesitant to add the connecting rods that extend from the levers out toward the trucks for fear that it will interfere with the wheels.  This time I just left the rods off altogether.  

I want to upgrade the car beyond its original kit parts using materials and methods that would have been available to the original builder, as much as possible.  But these days I'm feeling more of a pull to just get things done and move on to the next project sooner than later.  Maybe it's my age, or perhaps it is the circumstances of our world driving this feeling.  Regardless, I press on.

Up next I will turn my attention to the fascia boards and sides.  Though, at the time of this writing, I have received the data decals for the Four Flats...so as soon as I commit to a lettering arrangement, I may return to them.  We'll see.

The Morning Milk & Mail - A First Look

A few days ago in my post, End-of-Year Goals, I described the projects I hope to complete by the end of 2021.  One of those is the set of cars that will become the "Morning Milk & Mail", an all-stops passenger train that leaves early in the morning, handles the mail and picks up the milk on the Pine Branch.  I also have a set of Selley short passenger cars that will become the limited express hot-shot which will make no stops, but I decided to start on these Binkley cars, and the Red Ball (Binkley?) Fruit Car that will run with them. **

Originally I had planned to use a Selley Combine on this train, but then I found the elusive P-35 Binkley "Shorty Combine Caboose" that was marketed as a companion car for their "Oldie" Baggage.  These weren't "Sierra" cars*, or "Overton" cars; at least they weren't marketed that way that I've seen.  Interestingly, if you take the Binkley 1870 Baggage-Mail car and chop it in half right down the middle, you'll get the Shorty Baggage and the Shorty Combine.  Is that what they did?  I can only guess, but I think I'm on to something.  It would explain why the baggage door isn't centered, and why the small baggage door on the combine is so close to the windows.  Hmmm...

What I'm starting with are three cars in varying degrees of completion.  The Fruit Car I purchased used.  It was missing one truck and had some damage.  Close examination reveals it may have taken a tumble to the floor at some point.  I will be replacing the damaged parts and making a few upgrades.

The Baggage is a complete kit - but with incorrect parts.  Instead of the two-part end sills per the instructions, it has a nice set of end sill castings from Binkley made for their Business Car et al.  I will be building it as instructed, making few changes or upgrades.

Finally, the Combine is a real challenge.  Somebody built it years ago and it has seen better days.  Fortunately it only needs a new baggage door and some cleaning.  I will do as little as possible to repair this car with the aim of bringing it up to a better standard of construction.

So many rolling stock 'orphans' I see were built with good intentions, probably by someone just starting out in the hobby making the kind of mistakes we all might make, even being careful.  But these cars aren't the Athearn or Roundhouse plastic shake-the-box kits of my youth, or even some of the more complex plastic kits.  These were kits that summoned the craftsman in the builder, using terms in the instructions like 'measure', 'shape' and 'cut'.  Simple words, but they are qualitatively different from 'assemble' or 'insert'.  They require the builder to think differently, to assess the work and make decisions based on the state of construction and desired outcome.

*Binkley did market a set of Sierra cars, but these were the cast metal bodies from the same molds as the Laconia Sierra cars, later sold by Ulrich and Walthers.  I have a pair of these, have built one, and the other is awaiting construction.  They're narrow enough (for me at least) to be HOn3 cars if riding on suitable trucks...

**At the time I'm writing this I'm waiting on decals for the Four Flats project.  Turns out I didn't have the ones I wanted to use, but thankfully I located some on eBay.  Hated to lose the momentum I had going on that project, but glad to put my energy into this one!