Back on piste, with the advent and reality of a space for a layout fast approaching it was time to take stock....of the stock...I had.
Some of it is too early and has been moved on, some is rather old but has potential and some of it is more modern. The two basic choices are a depot type layout or an industrial switching.
I've opted for the latter simply because I don't realistically have the space for a depot to support my articulated engines, which really do need a decent turntable in the order of 130'. I could probably get away with a through line diesel depot like Oakland or the fuel lines at Taylor and I may try and squeeze a 2 road fuel point in somewhere.
Industrial allows for authentic tighter curves, for example several 2 bay hoppers will go around a 3' scale curve in real life, probably not with an engine, more like a track mobile as traction.
With that in mind and space constraints (never thought I'd say 17' x 7' L shaped was constrained) I've restricted stock to 60' as much as possible and prefer lower around the 56' margin. There's plenty of stock in that ball park, historical and modern to suit my needs, typically tanks, boxcars, bulkend flats and covered hoppers.
That kind of sets the grand scheme of things of where I'd like to head, track will be OW5, that which is visible (not covered by roadways, sand, soil, dirt, whatever, will be hand laid and spiked through 3D tie plates, the rest will be flat bottom flexi track. Location has to be fairly generic so that SP, ATSF, UP or CSX can run. Florida and LA are on pretty much the same Latitude so vegetation can be generic, I found it surprising for example to find fir trees in Florida to be honest.
Stock, I'll concentrate on covered hoppers for the time being, mainly because I have a handful of Weaver ACF 4 bays to hand, they're older RTR models and can be picked up cheap here and there. To be honest they are rather toy like with molded grab rails, thick side sheets and solid roof walkways and I had sort of dismissed them as viable options for modeling, however, more detailed versions are quite frankly, expensive, hard to come by in the UK and high shipping prices on top from the US.
Before we go further we do need to sort out what sort of industry we want to portray because that does have an impact on the stock, especially covered hoppers. These come in a bewildering range of sizes, capacities, weights, and manufacturers but I'm going to stick with ACF/ARI as they fit the Weaver model.
The following is a generalization, more bays does not mean a bigger car, there are 3 bay cars physically bigger then 4 bays and there are five bay cars the same size as fours. The number of bays is dependent on the floor slope angle which is dependent on the projected cargo to become fluid on discharge.
Generally speaking, cars fall into three categories, small/mini, large and jumbo dependent on their volumetric capacity. The over riding criteria is weight, the heavier the cargo the small the car, thus, small/mini's are nearly always 2 bay or short three bays, large are the three and four bay cars, jumbo can be three with shallow floors but typically 4 and 5 bay.
Typical cargoes are;
Small, sand, cement, perlite, roofing granules.
Large, corn, wheat, starch, malt, sugar.
Jumbo, oats, dry distiller grain, soybean meal, plastic pellets.
So if you're modelling a cement works you'll not see large or jumbo cars, similarly if you're modelling a soda drinks bottling factory you won't see small cars, you'll see jumbos with plastic pellets for example.
As an aside, BNSF operates one of the biggest covered hopper unit trains in the world (due to it's all brown covered hopper consist it goes by the nickname of 'the worm'), using large hoppers filled with grain for export it typically runs from the mid west to LA I believe. A full train can gross over 18,000T and typically runs a 5x3x2 set up, this one was under the limit and running 4x3x2 at West Amboy CA.
Even empty heading back through Winslow AZ it needs three units up front.
Back on track now, the Weaver four bay is going to be to big for my needs and a recent FB chop shop showed that you can carve up the Weaver model to make two and three bay hoppers from ACF/ARI.
Basically we're going to take this......
......and turn them in to these.
Twp bays.
The last BNSF image has black powder around the loading hatches, as did others either side, my best guess is that it's loaded with roofing granules, fine crushed stone basically.
Three bay.
The last SSW image is interesting as it shows the ACF style car with side cill beams to take the loading and buffing forces, the cars either side are a different design and called Thrusill, basically a big beam runs down the middle of the car to take loading, those I may approach later if needed.
There are several types of outlet gate and loading hatch, those will get defined when i finally decide on my industry and traffic flow.
The basic hack is to simply cut thew middle out of the car and join them together at the appropriate length, replace the molded foot steps with wire and detail some pipework, they can come out quite nice and if it all goes Pete Tong, it's only (in this case) £15 in the bin.
I want to try something different, new etched walkways are a must, replace all the end cage supports with brass angle and new steps, probably change the end bulkheads with brass and associated webs and alter the side ribbing and the lower cill to tie in with the new brass end pieces.
The Weaver model has a thin rib below the main upper cill, this denotes a car built before 1971, after 1971 the lower single rib was removed and two new thinner ones added to the top cill, it's an easy fix to do and brings the car forward to a more modern day era. The discharge gates will get replaced as will the loading hatches with 3D prints.
Without further ado, it's time to actually do some stuff, out with the razor saw and let hacking begin, more soon hopefully.
I handled the hotel reservation, he handled the show registration. We'll get it sorted out though.
