1:48 D&RGW Box Car

[Tom Neeson]

Hi Guys,

    I'm building a box car with Evergreen styrene and Grandt detail parts. It's your standard issue D&RGW 3000 series box car. Here is a pic of the underframe.

[Tom Neeson]

And here is a closeup of the center sill splice.

[Tom Neeson]

And here is the frame flipped over. I'm a little further along, will post more pics soon.

Thanks for looking,
Tom

[Ray Dunakin]

Looking good so far.

[Tom Neeson]

Thanks Ray,

Nice to hear from another late night modeler,

Tom

[marc_reusser]

Really nice and clean work Tom. Really shows on areas like the sill splices, and the laps/ joints of the cross pieces.

[Ken Hamilton]

Wow....that center sill splice is a great touch.  Wonderful attention to detail, which
no doubt will be carried through on the top end.  Beautiful job so far.

[lab-dad]

Really cool!
I love working with styrene.
I am curious though;
Why would they build a frame with a splice? I know there were timbers long enough.
-Marty

[Chuck Doan]

Nice splice! I haven't seen anyone do that before.

[Tom Neeson]

Thanks for the good words guys!

    I'm also building a train station (first model in 1:48 scale), have been at it for about 6 months and it's about 30% complete. Looking at it I figured it could be a good solid year before it is complete. So I thought I would build a boxcar as a quick diversion. Should only take a couple weeks, once I had all the materials, right? WRONG! Alot more work than I first thought.

Here is a shot of how I laid out the center sill splice, a template is attached to a piece of 0.020" x 0.187" styrene with removable double sided tape:

[Tom Neeson]

The part is trimmed out and glued to the core of the center sill, made up of two styrene strips.

[Tom Neeson]

Then the opposing ends are trimmed in a similar fashion, glued on, top pieces added, wait for glue to dry, sand to blend it all together, drill holes, add NBWs, blah blah blah...

Here's another shot of the splice. Next up, needle beams and the floor. Thanks aqain for your comments!

Oh, and Marty, I really don't know the reasoning for the splice, but my guess would be that it could be removed if they needed to replace a coupler or bolster or something.

[Tom Neeson]

O...M...G...

On closer inspection, my super cool splice is upside down and backwards...

shhh...don't tell nobody 

Tom

[lab-dad]

Here i fixed it for you!
-Marty

[finescalerr]

Marty! To the corner! (And I don't mean a virtual Photoshop corner, either!) -- Russ