New Boxcars for the Stockton & Ione

New boxcars for the Stockton & Ione are patterned after 1880s Denver & Rio Grande prototypes. The red barrels are on a building behind the cars.

The HOn3 Rail Line boxcar kit has been around for a while and it is a good representation of a 30-foot later period D&RGW car. I wanted to try to see if I could easily modify it to represent an early 25-foot car of 10-ton capacity. To do this, I cut the car at the door opening and glued the two halves together with some reinforcing strips inside. This gave me the necessary length. Using a fine razor saw, I removed the roof running boards. Some .020 thick styrene with .060 scribing applied right over the Murphy roof gave me the earlier wood plank roof. A .010 x .080 strip was applied for a new fascia and cut flush with the car ends. New doors were made from .020 scribed styrene and the door hardware from the kit used to "hang" it.
 

The lettering was varied slightly with the arth to a give a little variety to the cars.

 The earlier boxcars had short end platforms for the carmen to stand upon. I glued .060 x .124 strips with scribed siding to represent those. The nut-bolt-washer representations for the grab iron bolts were removed with a razor blade except for two on the end for the new grab irons. The floor was similarly shortened and reglued. Fishing line truss rods and Grandt turnbuckles were used. The brake cylinder was only applied to one car as I figured this little narrow gauge line would be slow in putting brakes on everything.
   

Compared to the 1875 S&I prototype cars, the D&RG freelanced cars are much more graceful.

   The cars were painted boxcar red and decals based on D&RG lettering schemes were applied. The finished car is not an exact model of the prototype but close enough for the Stockton & Ione.