A lot of the hardware on that Indestructible end looks familiar... If re-working an Accurail car it would be well worth saving the end sill just for the polinf pocket castings. Unfortunetly, the NYC

That photo of the Hutchins end with two pressings per panel is a new one on me... learn something new every day. Hutchins must have bought a bigger press before they were forced to end

All- Does anyone have any experience with slide and negative scanners? My all-in-one copiers can do a decent job of digitizing photo prints but, even though a couple of them have slide

Ken; Appreciate those notes. You are right. The ORER info is good for many applications. I was commenting on the lack of detail on the FW cars. The ORER notes are good, but incomplete for

Photo: WFEX Reefer 67899(1951) A photo from the Denver Public Library: https://digital.denverlibrary.org/digital/collection/p15330coll22/id/55050/rec/124 Click on the arrows in the upper right hand

RE: that armor plate… I find it interesting that Carnegie Steel was making armor plate for “Bethlehem Steel” ! (I’m guessing they were making it for Beth Steel’s shipbuilding operations,

A few notes: 1) Sometimes you NEED a (non-structural) floor to protect the load from debris kicked up from the roadbed. The B&M’s well cars had such, as they were used to carry gears from GE

Group; How about this combo of well car AND depressed center flat? It used a GSC casting to combine load-bearing well floor with depressed well, to boot. Load distributed on end decks and

Photo: CGTX 8654 Tallow Tank Car A partial photo of this tank car courtesy of the Old Time Trains website: http://www.trainweb.org/oldtimetrains/photos/cpr_rolling/tallow_tank.jpg This was taken in

Then there are these guys. I DARE you to build one. (The F&C kit is a great start). Prepare for some interesting fabrications! PRR took a handful of regular F25, and took the floor out and

Hi, Ben Dibble is a friend of mine, not a denizen of this list. But he’s quite willing to share his collection of photos of the subject cars. You can contact Ben directly if you want. His

I was off work yesterday and when I returned this morning I found my STMFC file sadly filled with “BILL WELCH” in the subject and my heart just dropped filled with the sorrow of loosing another

Group; Then there are the well cars with no floor, like the FN. Here is Jack Consoli’s fabulous rendition (featured in TKM) in which the load is both suspended and distributed to side sills

The straight bottom edges seen on one major rib of SRE ends existed on MANY freight cars of the postwar era but the only HO scale model in mass production is Accurail's version

Tom; They were 70-ton cars, believe it or not. Someone is going to weigh in on what class battleship that turret faceplate is destined for. I noted how the load is accommodated by

Group; One of the interesting engineering problems in those days was how to distribute a load across the car without destroying the car. For well cars with floors that were load-bearing, it

I do appreciate everyone’s comments and tributes to Bill. He entrusted me and a small group of fellow modelers to prepare part of his Celebration of Life service. To that end I am collecting photos

A piece of 18" armor plate that big must have been SOME heavy! Wonder what the capacity of the car was? Tom

So true, Jim. I thought about the airbrush demos last night. Here is a picture of Bill from CCB in 2016. He repeated the hands on at Collinsville that same year. And finally in

I’d met Bill at one of the RPM meets in Collinsville, Illinois and we both ‘hit it off’. Bill invited me to a small group session of ‘resin builders’ later that day. I was thinking how