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.