Pulpwood cars being weathered

[TLOC]

The effort to weather got derailed today. Only 3 hours sleep from 5:40am to 8:50 so this morning went by in a haze. At 11:45 the daughter texted asking Terry and I to join her and the granddaughter at the g/d’s favorite Mexican place for lunch. At 2:15 I had a consult with a doctor who will be doing my surgery in January.

So got home and decided the pulp car project needed something besides weathering. Mangle up some of the side frames.

Prototype car to imitate

Then a before shot of the model victim

picked the same side frames on the prototype to mess with on the model.

Above I thought using a heat gun would work and it sort of did. Here I thought putting the metal clamps as a heat sink would help. I tried to heat up the single post and see what happened. Well the heat sinks didn’t work and I got more mangled posts that I was looking for. AND, it was fine.

not bad, now to put the pulpwood load back on the car. Alas, it doesn’t fit as the mangled side frames cooled narrowing the load area. So, used a 1x3 to square the side frames again and by using the heat gun

Finally below the finished mangled side frames experiment is completed, this car now will get put back into storage but if I decide to mangle side frames of the 30 pulpwood car weathering project, I know I can do it.

tomO

 

[TLOC]

Put 3 pulp cars in the strip bag a few minutes ago. 70% IPA in a gallon freezer bag. Hopefully I can work on them tomorrow

TomO

 

[Greg@mnrr]

TomO: I've seen pulpwood transported via rail in gondola cars near Nekoosa and Appleton, WI. Maybe the carrier had a shortage of pulpwood cars like yours. But the gons would be an interesting addition to your fleet.

-Greg

 

[TLOC]

TomO: I've seen pulpwood transported via rail in gondola cars near Nekoosa and Appleton, WI. Maybe the carrier had a shortage of pulpwood cars like yours. But the gons would be an interesting addition to your fleet.

View attachment 137061
-Greg

Greg, thanks for sharing the picture. In the 70’s when we 1st moved to Central Wisconsin and the Milwaukee Road was running the Valley Sub one could see lots of tons of gondolas loaded as in your picture. Those cars usually were moving North to Wausau Papers in Brokaw, Wisconsin closed in 2012. Brokaw itself basically closed then too as it truly was a company town. It was dissolved itself into the Town of Maine a few years ago 3 million in debt due to the loss of the Paper Mill.


TomO

 

[gjslsffan]

Greg, thanks for sharing the picture. In the 70’s when we 1st moved to Central Wisconsin and the Milwaukee Road was running the Valley Sub one could see lots of tons of gondolas loaded as in your picture. Those cars usually were moving North to Wausau Papers in Brokaw, Wisconsin closed in 2012. Brokaw itself basically closed then too as it truly was a company town. It was dissolved itself into the Town of Maine a few years ago 3 million in debt due to the loss of the Paper Mill.


I started watching this thread when it started. I want to say your weathering is great. Weathering differs from car to car, and I dont think you can do wrong, unless it is so overdone, it's not realistic, and I dont see anything like that in your posts, rather I think (IMHO) they seem to be spot on. These pulp racks seem to be tortured like flat bottom gondolas. I much enjoy your images and progress.

 

[TLOC]

Tom H

thank you for your comments. I am having fun with a part of the hobby I have little experience with. I am trying not to over due it but the prototype photos definitely show heavy weathering. While I am not color blind I have trouble picking the colors to match a picture. This has caused many do overs. Only 3 though have needed to be stripped completely and repainted before weathering again. I am up to 23 of the 31 pulp cars done. I am not putting a finishing date on the 31. I have turned down 3 offers to sell weathered pulp cars in the past week. 3 of them are shown below. I explained my current sleep issues and that I am not yet 100% satisfied they are not good enough to sell. About 3 weeks ago on a FB buy/sell group I was tempted to buy another 10 but I already have too many.

TomO

 

[TLOC]

Well it’s been awhile. I ended up building the pulp wood fleet up to 50 cars. I have weathered and sold 26 cars of which 20 had real wood HO scale sized pulp loads.

I did keep 24 cars that I have changed out the wheelsets. The 36” steel wheelsets are from the Walthers Proto line of wheels. I have few issues with Walthers couplers, so those were left as is unless a change was requested. If there was an issue though Kadee #148 whiskers were the replacements. For my personal use the 148’s are used 100% on the layout. I maybe thinning the herd some more as I found a couple cars I would like but lettered for my free lance Wisconsin River Valley &Terminal RR. No rush as I used every pulp stick I made and I will wait for a snow melt to gather more branches.

TomO

 

[Rico]

That’ll be my spring project too!

 

[TLOC]

I do a lot of flip flopping around at the work bench, the layout and on rolling stock. While the pulp yard track can handle 8 cars at a time 4 looks better in my view. Why I acquired 50 pulp cars after years of having 12 is beyond me? The locals that bring product to the Paper Mill are generally 8-10 cars per shift with the rare amount of 12. There are always pulp cars on the pulp track, in the paper mill yard and on each local. 50 was crazy and it was just one of those, too much money for trains in PayPal, let’s spend it. Well, I am back to a reasonable number again, 18. None of my cars have pulp loads, that will be a Spring time project. All have new wheel sets, whisker coupler #148 and weathered. 29 cars were weathered and sold with new wheel sets installed. 3 cars need to be weathered and offered for sale. 20 cars were sold with real wood pulp loads and 9 without. The last three, who knows? When the last 3 are done I will post final pictures. Thank you for all who followed along, made comments and who purchased from me.

TomO

 

[TLOC]

Looking in the pulp yard I found a duplicate number in the Wisconsin Central pulp cars. It must go! This getting older is not easy. I thought I had checked the numbers 2 or 3 times, gee I forget!

Anyway on Facebook this is for sale. If you are interestEd private message me or look at the FB HO Scale sales groups. Any one here though gets a better deal then on FB.

Sorry I have no real pulp loads available until Spring

TomO

 

[TLOC]

Car has sold on FB.

I remember why I still had this car. I had a pending sale when the buyer realized he couldn’t afford 10 cars at once. So he dropped 5. I put this in the pulp yard for additional pictures that where done for a major online Hobby Shop advertisement campaign due out in the summer/fall of 2022 or 2023. I then forgot about it.

After the campaign comes out, I can show the behind the scene pictures I took. The photographer showed up on one of our -25f degrees wind chill days in January. He must have had 5 different light stand arrays he was planning to use. The paper mill was to be the background so I flipped the lights on under the valance and turned off the aisle lights and he then had his assistant take 3 of the stands back out to the van. He must have taken a 1000 shots of the Papermill over a 4 hour time frame. we moved the buildings around for some shots. He took about 100 pictures of the pulp cars, my Gp40-2wl on the track but with white and then green backdrops. Said they will combine the paper mill pictures with the pulp wood train.

I was paid some for the time and use of the layout. If they use the pictures in the campaign I will get some more!

TomO