[MOCs] Various American Freight Cars II

[Commander Wolf]

Similar to my thread of a year ago, wanted to share a couple more freight cars I've been building on the side:

 

Conrail N6A 

I've shown this Conrail transfer caboose in a couple of my threads, but never formally, so here it is. The prototype is one of several classes of transfer caboose Conrail inherited from the Penn Central.

 

The model was designed almost two years ago, and I got around to putting it together last year. 

 

The "skirt" that covers the tops of the wheels is typically the toughest thing to model on American freight cars: if you run on R40 track, the bogies usually need to pivot enough such that the wheels will scrape... this isn't a problem on the N6A because it's quite short; no fancy engineering is required to compensate! The geometry of the skirt and such are still similar to that of my earlier flatcar.

 

And with stickers

 

Brickshelf Gallery

 

PRR G43

Like the caboose, this gondola might have shown up a few times, but never formally. The G43 is a 52' gondola built during the last decade of the PRR. Most of them went to PC and then Conrail. 

 

 

 

This model was designed and built last year. The dimensions are very similar to the aforementioned flatcar, and it's basically built the same way: the structural component (the sides) is studs-out, and the floor and trucks are studs-up. Once again, much of the work done to make the skirts work on the flatcar are applicable here.

 

Thus, the hardest thing here was figuring out what to do about the shallow trapezoidal part in the middle - eventually I went with wing plates. 

 

Finally, this probably should have been dark red or reddish brown, but all three colors seemed to somewhat off, so I ended up going with the most common. I also looked at weathered designs, but its a little bit too difficult when there are a lot of large, exposed parts like the wings.

Brickshelf Gallery

 

Alaska Railroad 15800 Series

This is a side-dump car, typically used for MoW work. Technically Wikipedia thinks its a type of gondola.

 

As you can see, the specialized feature of this type of car is that it empties sideways: unfortunately the model does not have this feature!

 

This car has actually never been posted: I only recently completed the design and model:

 

 

Doing the textures on the sides was a little big challenging, especially trying to "blend" it with the ends. On the prototype there are a ton of funny angles that are hard to model in LEGO. Construction is otherwise typical: studs-out for the body, studs-up for the chassis. Those droid-body things are really good for the big pneumatic pistons.

 

 

 

Brickshelf gallery

 

Finally, this is a repost, but here is the gondola and caboose running with my EMD Model 40:

 

[JopieK]

They look really neat and very realistic! Great job Commander Wolf!

[Duq]

Pity the yellow dumper didn't make the video - that's my favourite of the three.

Is it me or should the caboose be a little taller?

[Man with a hat]

Those are really nice cars. Good detailing. And I agree with Duq that the caboose seems to have odd proportions.

[Commander Wolf]

When I first built it, I also thought the caboose looked very short, but looking at the model versus the drawing, I'm fairly convinced that it's the angles at which we typically look at the model versus the angles at which we look at the prototypes. I'll admit it's still a little odd. That being said, the caboose is fairly short in general, with a roof height of 12' versus 15' for many locomotives.

Spoiler

 

7 hours ago, Duq said:

Pity the yellow dumper didn't make the video - that's my favourite of the three.

Is it me or should the caboose be a little taller?

 

Yeah, I'm gonna try to shoot a little bit more video with all the cars together. Soon(TM).

[zephyr1934]

All great works, but I agree with Duq, the side dump car really stands out from the collection.

[Commander Wolf]

Finally had the chance to stitch together more clips of the cars... this time with the side-dump car as well

 

Bonus video with clips from BayLUG's annual Christmas show (does have the older two cars again though!)

 

[Vilhelm22]

4 hours ago, Commander Wolf said:

Finally had the chance to stitch together more clips of the cars... this time with the side-dump car as well

 

Now where's the caboose gone!?  Love the side-dump car - shame it doesn't have a dumping function.  The other two look good too.  How old is the wooden flatcar in the latest video?  Also, do you have multiple ones of these cars (except maybe not the caboose)?  A long train of them would look really good.