Pennsylvania Railroad G32 Gondola

 

I recently completed a Plate C Model Prototypes Pennsylvania Railroad G32 welded gondola.  I profiled my initial purchase here. The complete writeup of my build as well as changes I made will be in a forthcoming The Keystone Modeler (and would already have been if I hadn't been so distracted by other things... sorry TKM team!) It's a fine 3D printed model and I thoroughly enjoyed finishing it. More in TKM soon... and thank you to Todd Hermann for use of his Catasauqua Branch layout as a photo shoot location!

Mid-Atlantic RPM 2026

 

This amazing model/scene is the work of Tore Hjellset who is not only an excellent modeler, but made the trek from Norway to attend! The model is a Precision Scale kit with Artitec vehicles and figures and chains, hammer, and axe from Weinert. Well done!

I posted yesterday about my presentation at the recent MARPM event. I also promised (threatened?) to post some photos I snapped in the display room. Those are interspersed here. I would also like to comment in general about the high quality of the presentations that I was able to attend. The slate of presenters was strong and every clinic I saw was informative and well presented... not a clunker among them. I came away more informed, made some new friends, and am thoroughly inspired to push forward on my own projects, which is what attending RPMs is all about. Look for one in your neck of the woods or even travel to one.

Greg Wiggins modified a Funaro & Camerlengo (F&C) PRR F22 kit to replicate this Clarendon & Pittsford marble service flat

Jim Dufour always brings plenty of models with beautiful supporting documentation. This is an in-progress C&EI 'War Bonds' 1937 AAR box car previously offered by Des Plaines Hobbies, with Viking roof. Jim made a pattern for the Creco door. Other details include Yarmouth runnijng boards and ladders, Tangent Klasing hand brake, Tahoe trucks, and National Scale Car placard boards. Whew! 

I'm not even sure what the prototype is for this, but it got Gerard Fitzgerald excited! Model by Jeremy Zablocki

These two beautiful buildings represent 429-423 Front St. in Catasauqua, PA circa 1955 as built by Todd Hermann

There were 3D printed models in the house, including this WP stock car from Lines West as modeled by Mat Thompson

I love Death Valley so Trona is town and railroad near and dear to my heart. This ex-SP unit was modeled by Kinzer Hurt

Matt Hurst always seems to be kitbashing something. This is an Atlas USRA rebuild that he is detailing to model an ACL O-16 rebuilt USRA box car

Mark Gionet started with an F&C overhead bunker, 8-hatch CN reefer and added Atals trucks, Smoky Mtn draft gear, Tangent lift bars, Kadee running board and brake hand wheel, Detail Assoc and A-Line steps, Yarmouth brake step, Cal=Scale steam and signal line hoses, and Plano hatch supports... whew! Oh, CDS lettering too

Mark also brought this Red Caboose box car with Speedwitch parts and lettering (I highly approve!) plus Tahoe trucks

This nicely weathered Tangent tank car is the work of Steve Raqué

Steve also had this G32B, a 3D printed model from Plate C

John Frantz weathered this Bowser F30A and added reweigh and lube stencils plus ACI barcodes from Tangent

Lou Papineau brought his usual large number of resin models, including this F&C composite CNJ gondola

Presentation File from MARPM

I attended this past weekend's Mid-Atlantic RPM in Linthicum, Maryland. For several days prior, I had been experiencing insanely debilitating allergies. The trip down by car seemed to clear them up. However, I kid you not, once I was back in the Hudson Valley driving home Sunday evening, they came back with a vengeance and have not abated, even though I have been taking every med known to allergists. I am hopeful if they're not gone by next week, a trip to Naperville will relieve them!

Back to the RPM. I presented a clinic on the SP's forty-foot postwar box cars. The file may be found via this link. As time permits, I will also share some images that I captured from the event as well as a general write up about my expeirence (all good!)

Naperville 2002 - John Spencer Models

 

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.

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.

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

My Draft Gear aka "Coupler Boxes"

I have always been a little underwhelmed by the draft gear available to HO scale modelers, be they the "boxes" on simple cars or the "scale" draft gear available from various purveyors. I find them to be either too wide, with ridiculously large openings for the couplers and/or too undetailed. Byron Rose created patterns for very nicely detailed draft gear included in many Westerfield offerings, but it was wider than I preferred, no doubt to accommodate Kadee no. 5 couplers (scale-sized or close to scale couplers were still in the future when the patterns were created.)

I decided to create draft gear to suit my own tastes. The main given is that it must accommodate the Kadee whisker scale sized coupler, as I feel that is an easy coupler to source and use. I set about making parts that were as narrow as possible, knowing that the widest part of the coupler is around the post where it pivots. I believe I succeeded in making it as narrow as possible yet still operable.

I recently tested a half dozen cars equipped with the parts on a layout with numerous handlaid turnouts and radii down to about 20-22". The cars were mostly forty-footers, but did include the 50' X32A. I can report that there was not a single issue related to coupler swing and the only issues encountered were the same as with many other cars where the couplers did not couple on the first attempt. The cars were operated and switched for several hours, providing a good amount of feedback about how the draft gear would function, even with 50' cars around tight curves.

I have included this draft gear in several recent kit offerings and will now move to offer them as separate parts as soon as I can produce sufficient quantities to release them. 

Al Hoffman

 

Al Hoffman, left, with Lloyd Keyser at the recent St. Louis RPM, courtesy of Steve Hile

Al Hoffman died recently at age 80. I met Al in the late 90s after a Naperville RPM. I was headed to the airport and Al, along with the late Bat Masterson, offered me a ride. That introduction led to an almost 30 year friendship. Al lived in Connecticut and when I moved back there in 2005, we saw each other frequently, usually weekly. 

Al grew up in the suburbs west of Chicago watching his beloved Burlington's trains. They became an outsized influence on his pursuits. He was a graduate of Shimer College in Illinois, including a year's study at Oxford. Al's professional work was for a leveraged buyout firm based in Connecticut. Al was the guy sent in to companies to look at the books and operations and effect the improvements that made such investments profitable. Employees of the firm received equity in companies that were bought out, in the form of stock. Al held his equity in one such company when all others in his firm had liquidated; that investment ultimately made Al "beer rich" (as opposed to champagne rich... his words!) That allowed Al to retire quite young.

brasstrains.com photo

Many of you may not have been acquainted with Al as he generally preferred to operate behind the scenes. However, you are almost certainly the beneficiary of his efforts. Al's post retirement life was focused heavily on his love of model trains and their prototypes. Al had been involved in many projects produced by brass importers, including Nickel Plate Products, Oriental, Overland, Coach Yard,and Challenger, among others. Al often created drawings for projects that he championed. He also imported some Burlington passenger equipment under his own line, Aurora Shops, including the car shown above. Al worked with many resin kit manufacturers, too, including Sunshine, Westerfield, Bethlehem Car Works, and yours truly, as Speedwitch. Al also collaborated with many makers of injection molded products, such as Intermountain, Kadee, Life Like/Proto 2000/Walthers, and Tangent. If a manufacturer ever responded positively to one's of Al's product "suggestions" they became intimately aware of Al's doggedness. For me, his biggest influence was introducing me to Michael Urac, with the Focus on Freight Cars series being the result. Al authored articles in historical society and prototype-related publications. He seemed to have his finger in many pots, with some of those efforts still to come.

While he didn't do nearly as much as he would've liked, Al did manage to build some models. The caboose above is one of his efforts, based upon a resin kit. I gladly painted it for him. Al was extremely gifted at working with brass and had a slew of partially completed projects where he replaced the tires and driver centers, turned new boiler fronts on his lathe, stripped and redetailed locomotives, etc. He was also an avid collector of what I call sad sack models and kits, exemplified well by the ancient Railmaster line of white metal kits, notably a 65-foot mill gondola based upon the AAR design. I am certain that Al owns more than 50% of the extant kits of this type.

In addition to all of these pursuits related to railroads and models, Al was an extremely generous human. I will spare the details, but he used his good fortune to aid others less fortunate, often anonymously.

In his personal life, Al was a life long bachelor until the last decade. He was wed to Mary (Gerritsen) of Valparaiso, Indiana. Al is also survived by a nephew in Colorado who he was deeply fond of.

One last thing I will share is that if you did not know Al, you were unaware of his extremely frugal side, that was sometimes belied by its very nature. Al owned a Toyota Camry from the mid-80s that he ordered with a V6 engine, manual transmission, and crank-operated windows (non-powered.) He ordered it because that combination wasn't available at the showroom. He drove it over 400,000 miles and when the frame began to rust, he had a new frame installed on the old car at great expense! That was Al. Rest in Peace and may the everafter be filled with Burlington resin kits

I had many lunches (often preceded by a visit to The Hobby Gallery back in the day,) trips to meets and shows, and long phone conversations with Al, especially about things that he wanted me to produce. I knew him as well as any of my railroad friends and will miss him greatly. He left too soon. 

Greetings from Vermont

 

Enosburg Falls, Vermont, September, 1941, Jack Delano, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress

I spent several days in Vermont over the past week visiting with family. There were two outings that were tangentially related to railroads that I want to share. We had dinner in Enosburg Falls one evening with a family member who resides there. It is a quaint smallish town near the Canadian border with typical New England charm. It still has a town green/square (Lincoln Park) that even featured an orchestra playing favorites from film as part of an outdoor evening concert. Back in the day, the town was on the Central Vermont's Richford Branch (named the Missisquoi [sic] Branch on the Sanborn map) to Richford. It is as bucolic a modeling subject as your mind conjures. There's even some dude in Virginia modeling the branch! [Marty's blog contains all the details] Many of the bones of the line are still there, albeit as paved rail trails and heavily modified structures. It's an interesting walk into the past nonetheless if you squint and imagine.

New England Dairies, Enosburg Falls, Vermont, September, 1941, Jack Delano, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress

Enosburg Falls Sanborn map, illustrating the area from the photo at top of the page, circa 1920

The other railroad-related outing was a walk with my wife on the Lake Champlain causeway. The causeway was created in 1901 to span Lake Champlain from Colchester to South Hero Island, Vermont (north of Burlington). There was a bridge, as well, that is now gone, replaced by in season ferry service to span the 200-foot gap in the causeway. Today, it's a path used by tons of cyclists and a smaller number of walkers/hikers. 

There's an avian critter (Great Blue Heron) in the angle formed by the tree's trunk and the large stone