April 2007

Visitors from away.

One of the great railfan pastimes here in ‘the valley’ is spotting railcars from far away places. Even non-fans can often be heard around the office, or on the front porch, commenting on a new and different car that was recently seen in town. Conversation always turns to wondering what’s in it or where it’s going.

A few us were together on a Sunday afternoon last fall to get some detailed photos of these strangers so our future modelling efforts would benefit from our notes. The spring meet in the city offered some very strong competition and we all expected to carry off a few of those trophies. Luckily we were able to catch a pair of old Pacific Great Eastern boxcars right in down town Winter Valley. The pair was probably the last of the old fleet still wearing their original herald and reporting marks. A great find to start the day.

These typical Aristocraft 40 footers were painted and deckled for a large Canadian dealer and offered at a special price to their customers. Original Aristocraft cars road very high on their frames expecting to find a home in the weeds and other clutter of a garden railroad. Later offerings such as this were correctly lowered to please the more discerning modeller. Both are unmodified except for a light weathering with earth and rust coloured chalks.

The painting and decaling are beautifully done on this 53 Evans car made by Aristocraft. Problem is, BCIT never had any Evans cars so this is another example of a manufacturer using an already existing product and painting it in a scheme that will attract new buyers. It worked. I weathered it with chalk, sealed it with Dullcoat and blacked the shinny silver wheels. All of the cars shown here have been fitted with Kadee 930 body mounted couplers.

Over near the Grande Prairie elevator siding at we found some workers laying in a new culvert and a venerable old 36 foot tanker still decked out in an equally ancient British – American logo. Both concepts now pretty much relegated to the dustbins of history. Clearly there was a customer somewhere at the end of some very light rail.

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At the beginning of my journey into the world of large-scale trains there was nothing on the market in the way of modern tank cars. I expect manufactures were playing both sides of the fence back then and so they always offered cars that could play well to the narrow gauge field (the biggest portion of the hobby) as well as the standard gauge crowd. This car still does that although there are all metal, 50 foot tank cars made now that are beautiful and inexpensive as well.

The nice decal is in memory of my Dad who started out his life with us as a BA employee in small town Saskatchewan.

Out on the main line just East of Pearson we spotted a pair of well warn 53-foot Railbox cars passing through with some equipment for the oil industry. As expected, they were pretty much like today’s other leased cars. A cleaning and a paint job were long past overdue. We took a few photos of the best of the pair because, at least on this one, graffiti had not completely covered the road numbers and the reporting marks.

Another Aristocraft 53 foot Evans car is disguised as something it isn’t. Railbox never had this type of car but they did have plenty of 50+ foot cars. Single and double door types. All yellow with black doors and the familiar arrow logo. So it shouldn’t be unexpected that Aristocraft would offer a colourful substitute. This car was patch masked and weathered with an air gun and then the work was completed with chalk to closely match a number of reference photographs I had on hand.

This Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo visitor from Southern Ontario was a great find. There are fewer and fewer basic 40 footers around any more. The standard boxcar in the late 70’s is now over 50 feet in length and even that is quickly giving away to single and double container flats. Who knows what a train will look like by the year 2000. Probably made up of nothing but stacks - but that’s hard to imagine. Still, we figured we’d better be on the safe side and collect a few shots while we sill could.

Canadian G-Scale Trains is sort of a new kid on the block and they are offering a new line of finely scaled, 1/29 th PS1 boxcars with road names that will be very familiar to Canadian modellers. There are two or three varieties of CNR ‘leaf’ designs as well as CPR and ON designs. These come with nice under frame details, a great brake wheel assembly, blackened steel wheels and a well-done roof walk (which I promptly removed to meet the prevailing code for a mid seventies railway). I added the 1967 centennial symbol as well as the ACI label and then weathered it with an air gun to match on line photos.

Another Canada G-Scale trains PS1 boxcar. I left the roof walk in place because all the pictures I had of this car (and I actually had a great shot of 92054) showed that they had retained their roof walks as of 1976. In keeping with the photos I had I only dusted this car with a light chalk and I plan to add the ACI labels during the next round of maintenance. Once again, I have added Kadee 930 body mounted couplers.

Not surprisingly, most of the traffic through Pearson and Winter Valley consists of less-than-carload boxes, some flats and a few tankers. Containers show up now and again in support of the oil industry but open gons are quite rare. Finding a pair of empties next to the power plant was quite a surprise. Better yet, although one was the sole WV 40 footer the other was yet another visitor from down East. The Algoma Central car was just one of a huge fleet of gondolas that almost became the trademark of the railway. Close-ups of that logo were a must.

When N scale was in its infancy, the late 60’s and very early 70’s, there was nearly nothing available. Perhaps only a dozen engines and 35 different cars. The thrill, and challenge, was to build a believable railway using just those few pieces of rolling stock and some balsa wood. HO scale hadn’t been taken over by crazy nitpickers yet but even then the selection was huge and far from fun. Now just about everything is available ‘off the shelf’ for all scales except large scale. That’s why this is so interesting. Is that gondola prototypical? No way! Not even close. But it’s been seen by thousands and no one cares. That’s the fun of it I guess.

I once saw a long line of Great Northern boxcars on a siding out in the east end of Moose Jaw Saskatchewan. They were waiting for the torch along with some similar cars once belonging to the Northern Pacific and the Spokane, Portland and Seattle. I guess someone had bid on the batch and they were delivered to the CN siding to await their fate. Now seeing just one car in nearly pristine condition was very rare. We took plenty of photos while there was still some daylight and made notes on every detail.

USA trains entered the market with their modern fleet of cars just in time. Their 1870 – 1930 era narrow gauge stuff was never of interest to me but that seemed the predominant flavour for large scale modelling during the early garden railway days. I now buy USAT products, engines and rolling stock, almost exclusively. The detail is suburb and although it can get a little ‘fussy’ for the rugged out doors it’s wonderful for in door activities. This car has been very lightly weathered with chalk and the ACI label has been added.

Back home in Winter Valley they were moving a double door boxcar into the siding next to the machine shop. Perhaps they were going to move out some of that heavy old machinery that had collected there over the past 50 years. Or perhaps they were simply helping out with a beer bottle return campaign. The Northern Alberta Railway was run as an independent prairie short line but it was a joint Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway venture therefore nearly all their rolling stock reflected the larger owners. On the other hand, these outside braced cars were built for the NAR and the owners had none of their own. It was a fitting ‘catch’ at the end of our daylong adventure.

This car became a ‘project’. The plan was to build three. Two for the Winter Valley layout and one for a new NAR layout just underway. An Aristocraft double plug door car would serve as the starting point. All of the detail was removed from the doors and new USAT sliding doors were attached. Scale styrene shapes were added as outside bracing and door rails and the frame was cut into shape. The motto “From the land of the might Peace” was done on the computer and the rest of the logo and reporting marks were custom made by G Scale Graphics. The paint was chip matched at a local high end paint supply store and sprayed on. So far only one has been finished.

I hope you enjoyed today’s tour. Please drop by and visit the rest of the large scale gang at, www.mylargescale.com You’ll have a ball.