Not dead

I'm not dead...I've just been severely hampered by selling our house and finding a new one...as well as working long hours at work and teaching two halflings to love trains.

I've done a few odds and ends in recent months, but my time has been too limited to photograph it or blog about it. The major project has been converting a Grandt Line C&S SUF stockcar I received for Christmas into a truss rod car.

http://www.grandtline.com/model_railroad/rolling_stock_and_locos.htm

There are a few hardware modifications needed for this, as well as a new roof and a new frame. The 1907-8 C&S freight cars were built with Betterndorf hardware (not just the trucks). The 1909-1910 cars were similar, but had steel underframes (SUF) rather than heavier wood frames with truss rods. The earlier C&S cars were different animals, despite many of these cars being indistinguishable to the untrained eye (such as the surviving C&S stockcar at the Colorado Railroad Museum).


This shows the partially completed brake rigging with the new frame, truss rods, and trucks with modified brake beams (to be free rolling and allow the trucks to be removed without removing the brake beams from them).


The interior of the car and the underside of the new roof (probably wrong...as I suspect that they were actually internal Murphy Roofs rather than wood). Like the frame, it is all styrene.


The top view of the roof.


A view showing a few of the minor variations I've made from the instructions and modifications to the kit. The wood frame is made from noticeably heavier timbers than those used with a SUF car. A noticeable change is the modification to the stake hardware...for the bolster's truss rod.


Note: Trainfestival 2011 was this past weekend and it was located in the Quad Cities (Davenport, Moline, E. Moline, Rock Island, and BETTERNDORF). Betterndorf is where the hardware was made for the 1907-1910 C&S freight cars. Today, there is a casino on the site.