I was digging through an old hard drive and came across folders of photos from my earliest digital camera. Apparently I brought that camera to Naperville in 2002 because I had numerous images of models from the display room. Truth be told, I was searching for images and notes about the St. Louis Refrigerator car model shown above and below (his notes about this project included at the bottom of this post.) It is the work of John (Jack to those who know him) Spencer. Before discussing his work, I will share that Jack was part of the St. Louis freight car "mafia" along with Ed Hawkins and Pat Wider of Railway Prototype Cyclopedia fame plus Ray Long (the "Long" of the Hawkins-Wider-Long photo collection.) They would carpool to Naperville every year.
Jack's modeling was and still is some of the finest HO scale freight car modeling that I have ever seen and he did much of it without the benefit of etched parts, Tahoe trucks or the Tangents that we have today. Jack had many "hacks" to achieve his work. First among them was his voracious appetite for information. He was among the first modelers I met who considered a general arrangement drawing merely a starting point; he wanted the drawings for the metal parts, brake arrangements, etc., to really do justice to a model. He was also a highly skilled pattern maker of details combined with the ability to make resin duplicates of those parts to enable his efforts. Lastly, he was fanatical about the use of very thin (usually 0.003") mylar sheet as a vehicle for making details, including embossing rivets in the mylar (note that this mylar material is available at art supply stores and is not the same as the shiny material used in balloons.) One other thing that Jack used that has become a staple of my modeling is Goo and/or Barge cement thinned with MEK as a vehicle to assemble dissimilar materials.
Jack also thought nothing of going to seemingly great lengths to refine kit parts. If you're familiar with the finely rendered Apex Tri-Lok running boards in Branchline kits, you know that the ends are "see-through" as on the prototype, but most of the length of the part is solid. Jack would diligently thin the part from the underside until it was "open" over its entire length. Why? Because it was a beautiful replica of the running board except for not being "open" over its entire length.
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| Note that on this IMWX/Red Caboose model, Jack removed the second stringer on each side of the underframe as the prototype had only a single stringer on each side of the center sills |
Old age has caught up to Jack and he doesn't make the journey any longer. I miss grabbing a few minutes with him to talk about projects, techniques, and the like. He is one of the pioneers of "extreme" freight car modeling and deserves more notoriety than the modest way he carried himself allowed. A big thank you to Jack for inspiring many of us.
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| Jack added many details to make this Stewart model accurate for an N&W H-9 including the roping loop castings above the trucks at each body bolster location. Also note the steel plates added to the lower half of each panel, fabricated from Mylar with embossed rivets |
