The best gift to give a railroader for Father's Day is...
Ties.
Bad joke. But this summer I got a little bored and was looking at the Algoma Central 61' gondola I had kitbashed from two Model Die Casting 40' gondola kits a while ago. I hadn't done anything more than painted it and then it sat.
And sat.
And sat.
So I broke out the CDS dry transfers I had won on eBay years ago (so long ago, I was living in North Bay, which is a long time ago) and tried them out. Or at least I tried to. They wouldn't transfer from the sheet to the plastic body of the model for some reason. I got the bright idea to burnish them on to some blank decal film and sure enough, they transferred on to that.
So, now I had waterslide decals for my AC gondola. And they went on beautifully. I did replace the numbers with ones taken from a CN locomotive decal set, as the numbers were of better quality.
The original purpose of these gondolas (I believe) was to haul trees to be turned into pulp. I've also heard that they were sometimes used to haul steel products from the Algoma Steel plant in Sault Ste. Marie. But at the end of their useful lifespan, many of these gondolas were put into scrap tie service.
I wanted to add a scrap tie load to this gondola. I looked all over the internet for pre-cut ties. Great prices, until it came time to add the shipping from their locations to the middle of nowhere. Same problem with stripwood...the shipping kills any chance of me buying anything out here.
I did, however, have some 1/4" square balsa wood strip in my workshop. Work was throwing it out and I rescued it and gave it a new home. Now I needed to give it a new purpose. A quarter inch is way too big to be HO scale railroad ties.
I created two jigs from some of the balsa wood to help with making that strip into ties.
The top jig has a straight pin poking through. Place a piece of balsa in the L shape and drag it through the pin to make a line in one side of the balsa. Rotate the wood and repeat until all four sides have a line. That line then can be easily cut to make the longest railroad ties you'll ever need.
The bottom jig has a notch that is set eight scale feet from the end. This notch allowed me to stack four ties in place and cut them all at once.
In less than an hour, I went from having multiple pieces of quarter inch strip balsa to this:
Okay, to be fair, that's not the whole pile. I made a lot more than this, because I needed a lot more than this. I also needed to stain the ties so that they'd look older and more beat up, and the prototype ties are preserved with creosote, a nasty black substance.
By the way, don't use old railroad ties in your real garden. They leech poison into the ground, and they're not technically legal to use on your property. Yuk.
I used six different methods to stain the ties so that I had a little bit of variety.
1. Windex mixed with flat black craft paint. They soaked for about an hour to get the black into the wood. When the ties dried, they were a nice dark gray colour.
2. Sharpie marker. I just painted two ties with black marker. Not bad, but not great for the marker.
3. Craft paint mixed with flow aid. A nice black colour showed up on the ties I hand painted with this mixture.
4. Craft paint mixed with water. I ended up with a few ties that looked like a lighter gray colour. Not great.
5. Windshield washer fluid mixed with flat black craft paint. Wow...I wanted black ties, and this gave me a lot of different grays and blacks coming out of the wood. I've never used windshield washer fluid as a thinner before, but this might be something to do in the future.
6. Black and white acrylic tube paint mixed with flow aid. Nice dark gray.
I didn't want to spend the whole time creating tons of ties and then hiding five layers of them under a top layer, so I made a cradle to take up the bottom of the gondola. That 1/4" balsa has many uses...
After test fitting the cradle, I painted the top of it flat black so that it wouldn't show through the tie load. Chances are that it wouldn't, but I didn't want to have any possible issues.
The first layer of scrap railroad ties:
The second layer:
And the top layer, which I played around with:
I gave some of the ties some dings and dents, as they are ties that have been in service for many years and have been abused by machinery lifting them and putting them into these gondolas. There is still some weathering to do on the ties to make them even better than they are now, but that will come at another time.
To finish this car, I'm going to add scale coupler pockets and Kadee scale couplers, and a coupler lift bar. The yellow striping on the side is real yellow reflective striping I picked up on eBay. I have a roll that will do my entire collection of rolling stock and then some.
I did not take many photos while building this gondola, which means I can't show others how I did it. The good news is, I have another set of decals and am looking to scratchbuild a second gondola to put into tie service. For that project, I'm going to be taking photos and showing every step.
I hope my project inspires you to create something. Thank you for reading this.
Bad joke. But this summer I got a little bored and was looking at the Algoma Central 61' gondola I had kitbashed from two Model Die Casting 40' gondola kits a while ago. I hadn't done anything more than painted it and then it sat.
And sat.
And sat.
So I broke out the CDS dry transfers I had won on eBay years ago (so long ago, I was living in North Bay, which is a long time ago) and tried them out. Or at least I tried to. They wouldn't transfer from the sheet to the plastic body of the model for some reason. I got the bright idea to burnish them on to some blank decal film and sure enough, they transferred on to that.
So, now I had waterslide decals for my AC gondola. And they went on beautifully. I did replace the numbers with ones taken from a CN locomotive decal set, as the numbers were of better quality.
The original purpose of these gondolas (I believe) was to haul trees to be turned into pulp. I've also heard that they were sometimes used to haul steel products from the Algoma Steel plant in Sault Ste. Marie. But at the end of their useful lifespan, many of these gondolas were put into scrap tie service.
I wanted to add a scrap tie load to this gondola. I looked all over the internet for pre-cut ties. Great prices, until it came time to add the shipping from their locations to the middle of nowhere. Same problem with stripwood...the shipping kills any chance of me buying anything out here.
I did, however, have some 1/4" square balsa wood strip in my workshop. Work was throwing it out and I rescued it and gave it a new home. Now I needed to give it a new purpose. A quarter inch is way too big to be HO scale railroad ties.
I created two jigs from some of the balsa wood to help with making that strip into ties.
The bottom jig has a notch that is set eight scale feet from the end. This notch allowed me to stack four ties in place and cut them all at once.
In less than an hour, I went from having multiple pieces of quarter inch strip balsa to this:
Okay, to be fair, that's not the whole pile. I made a lot more than this, because I needed a lot more than this. I also needed to stain the ties so that they'd look older and more beat up, and the prototype ties are preserved with creosote, a nasty black substance.
By the way, don't use old railroad ties in your real garden. They leech poison into the ground, and they're not technically legal to use on your property. Yuk.
I used six different methods to stain the ties so that I had a little bit of variety.
1. Windex mixed with flat black craft paint. They soaked for about an hour to get the black into the wood. When the ties dried, they were a nice dark gray colour.
2. Sharpie marker. I just painted two ties with black marker. Not bad, but not great for the marker.
3. Craft paint mixed with flow aid. A nice black colour showed up on the ties I hand painted with this mixture.
4. Craft paint mixed with water. I ended up with a few ties that looked like a lighter gray colour. Not great.
5. Windshield washer fluid mixed with flat black craft paint. Wow...I wanted black ties, and this gave me a lot of different grays and blacks coming out of the wood. I've never used windshield washer fluid as a thinner before, but this might be something to do in the future.
6. Black and white acrylic tube paint mixed with flow aid. Nice dark gray.
I didn't want to spend the whole time creating tons of ties and then hiding five layers of them under a top layer, so I made a cradle to take up the bottom of the gondola. That 1/4" balsa has many uses...
After test fitting the cradle, I painted the top of it flat black so that it wouldn't show through the tie load. Chances are that it wouldn't, but I didn't want to have any possible issues.
The first layer of scrap railroad ties:
The second layer:
And the top layer, which I played around with:
I gave some of the ties some dings and dents, as they are ties that have been in service for many years and have been abused by machinery lifting them and putting them into these gondolas. There is still some weathering to do on the ties to make them even better than they are now, but that will come at another time.
To finish this car, I'm going to add scale coupler pockets and Kadee scale couplers, and a coupler lift bar. The yellow striping on the side is real yellow reflective striping I picked up on eBay. I have a roll that will do my entire collection of rolling stock and then some.
I did not take many photos while building this gondola, which means I can't show others how I did it. The good news is, I have another set of decals and am looking to scratchbuild a second gondola to put into tie service. For that project, I'm going to be taking photos and showing every step.
I hope my project inspires you to create something. Thank you for reading this.
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