Pulpwood car

Discussion in 'Modeling Tips' started by skyraider, Dec 7, 2022.

  1. skyraider

    skyraider Member

    A friend recently sold me a bunch of cheap flatcars, all badly needing renovation and repairs. The first became the military flat that I posted in the troop train thread. The second is this pulpwood car.

    After regluing several parts, cleaning the ridiculously dirty wheels and other various things, I had to figure out how to find the exact center of the flatcar between the bulkhead ends. It turned out the simplest thing to do was just to put down two (one on top of the other) pieces of double sided tape and not glue the logs in the center of the car. The reason for using two layers of tape is that the wood would sink into the tape a tiny bit more and stick a little better (at least that's the plan).

    After some research on pulpwood cars, a strip of wood was glued down each edge to give the necessary "cant" or tilt to the pulpwood.the strip wood was distressed and then weathered with a thin gray-brown stain.

    Gluing in the wood proved to be more difficult than expected. They are all shapes and diameters imaginable, and don't stack well. I picked the straightest ones I could but sticks out of the back yard aren't as straight as they look when you bring them into the modeling room. The reason the car isn't quite full is weight: it's a metal car and the thing weighs a ton with a partial load!!!! Maybe I'll add more wood, but for now it will sit in the yard or on a siding and look like a partially loaded car.

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    Ozarktraveler, pensive, qaprr and 2 others like this.
  2. gjslsffan

    gjslsffan Staff Member Staff Member

    Speaking as a RR'r those pulpwood racks would have been some miserable loads once in a while. As the load components would shake and rattle their way out to the point they would obstruct High/Wide detectors and such.

    A quick story on similar, well, now that I typed it, maybe not so quick. We had 50' flats thru here with concrete ties headed to CA, with same headed back east with back-loaded wood ties (w spikes and tie plates) headed for a someone's project back east. Those wood ties shaked and rattled out to the point (you guessed it), they tripped detectors requiring set out for re-alignment, before eastward movement. (Names changed to protect the guilty) Henry was told to shove these 5-6 cars in to a city side track so the car men could work them over. Well, Henry didn't protect the shove as good as he should have, and damaged a gondola load-out built with heavy timbers, when told to STOP! Henry stopped, and told the engineer to pull back, and Henry finished knocking down the load-outs that had stood for over 55 years. Not to mention some homeless folks lost a really good hootch. Henry retired a few years later with over 50 years of service. Homeless people were madder than the RR was. We had to walk past them for months to get on trains.
     
    WindsorSpring, skyraider and geep07 like this.
  3. WindsorSpring

    WindsorSpring Member

    Sticks from the yard make a credible pulp log load! Who knew!
     

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