Thursday, August 6, 2015

Another Town Finished and a Long Caboose

An overview of Burnett's with the corral, general store and warehouses.
The scenicking around Burnett's is pretty much complete now. There are still some vehicles and figures which need to be added but I'm happy with how things turned out. The Gilmer & Martin Warehouse is for grain and is a big shipper for the railroad while the Golden State Box Company turns out crates for the area's fruit and produce packaging industry.
 
The Gilmer & Martin warehouse is to the left while the depot and storage room
are at the right.
The G&M building is scratchbuilt based on plans found in SP station plats plus some insurance diagrams (no photos found yet). The GS Box building is a Walthers shed to which I added a platform and did some weathering so it would like a little unkempt. The interesting part of the area is that it was not an agency station but it had both a depot building and a storage facility. These are modeled full size. In 1871, the depot building was a saloon but, by 1895, it was a depot so I modeled an enclosed waiting room. The other building was called a barn or just storage. Again, no photos of either so I put together a sort of baggage/storage building and painted it the railroad's color scheme.
 
Looking down the county road into the crossroads of Burnett's shows the general store plus the grain warehouse.
The stock pens were also there so I used a Walthers stockyard kit to make these. Some day, I'm going to have to build up some stock cars. Ziegenhorn's General Merchandise stores rounds out the crossroads area. I may yet add a local blacksmith shop but I need to do some other things first.
   
The S&C's Long Caboose could seat around 32 people plus the train crew so it could take a load off a regular passenger train.
While waiting for things to dry, I started a project I had been looking forward to: a Central Pacific Long Caboose. While some folks would call it a drovers' caboose, the CP just labeled it a "long caboose" so that is what the S&C will call it as well. It was obviously designed to carry a few passengers so I may have to convert one of my trains into a mixed. Drawings show the car as being 52 feet long over the end beams. My car was scratchbuilt using styrene with Grandt Line windows. The trucks were an odd size (6-ft. wheelbase) but I found just what I needed on the Shapeways site.
   What's next? Well, Burnett's was a flag stop but just exactly how did a prospective passenger flag a train? It turns out that several companies made small signals just for this purpose and that will be my next project.
 

2 comments:

  1. Beautiful caboose. Would you be interested in sharing how you built it?

    Eric

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  2. The drawings are in Tony Thompson's SP freight car book on cabooses (Vol. 2). I used Northeastern floor and caboose roof stock with Evergreen car siding for the body. The ends of the roof stock were sanded down to present a more scale appearance. Windows were Grandt line 4-pane with a couple of muntins removed. The end doors were also Grandt Line while the side doors were built up from styrene strips. The cupola was built up similarl to be body. Cardstock "frames" were glued behind the window cutouts. End platforms were old Westwood parts but other steps can be used such as those from Bitter Creek Models. The end railings are Cal-Scale. If you have any other questions, let me know.

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