STEEL MILL MODELING AGAIN, SORT OF.... G39 PRR Ore Jennie

 I’d mentioned in one of my more recent posts, that I was attempting to model the PRR G-39 ore jennie in O Scale 2 rail, using a combination of traditional scratchbuilding techniques and digital fabrication.   This is the car I am talking about - 

The PRR built 1000 of the G-39 ore jennies in the earlier 1960s.  They were to augment the thousand car fleet of G-38 ore jennies, that PRR built around 1960.   The underframe, general construction, width and length of the G-39 was essentially the same as the G-38, however, the G39 was 18” higher.  The extra height became necessary with the emergence of taconite ore.  Taconite pellets were lighter and, because of their rounded shape, there was more air space within the load.  The G-38 ore jennies were maxing out in volume, but not weight with taconite.  Adding 18” to the car, increased the amount of taconite that could be carried, up to the weight capacity of the car.  Some other improvements were made, notably, the oversized bumpers at each corner of the car.  These bumpers were to minimize damage at the ore piers by the narrow gauge pusher cars.

 Overall, the G38 and G39s were successful as purpose built cars.  They were four or five tons lighter and significantly shorter than the hoppers the PRR had been using to haul ore.  They had no bottom doors, meaning they could only be unloaded using a rotary dumper.   They were used in service between PRR ore docks in Cleveland and Philadelphia, to the inland steel mills, including my favorite, Bethlehem Steel.  Both the G38s and the G39s survived well into the Penn Central and Conrail Eras.

I am modeling the Penn Central in O Scale, roughly 1968-1976.   How this all started was the purchase of two Alco 630 locomotives.  The big Alcos were concentrated by the Penn Central in and around Mingo Junction, specifically for use pulling mineral trains to and from the steel mills.   I thought a string of these cars would look great behind them.    The only trouble with this plan, was that this car was never offered in O-Scale (it was in HO).  Looking at scratchbuilding 40-50 of these cars, I realized the laser and CNC were going to be important tools, to produce exactly identical parts, allow for the use of tabbing and slots to align parts without measuring tools or squares, etch markings in the plastic for part locations, and my personal favorite, and you will know what I mean if you have ever built a resin kit,  laser cutting/drilling 95% of the holes for the grab irons and other wire parts.  

The car floor is .125 acrylic.  The car sides, rim, steps/ladder verticals, coupler mounts, and underframe parts were made of .060 laser cut acrylic. The ribs were CNC cut from .100 styrene.     There is also some .020 styrene laser cut parts, as well as .020 laser cut polybacker for much of the detail.   Additionally, there is a mix of Evergreen strips and structural members used, along with wire, and Grandtline brake parts.   I’ll get into the actual development and construction of this model in more detail in a later blog or YouTube video.  

This is the first completed car - technically Version 5.0.  There were some very minor corrections made and construction of the first ten cars of Version 6.0 are underway.    Looking at more prototype photos while designing and constructing the model, I realized that Penn Central ore trains were a mix of G-39s and the older G-38s.   The ratio was typically 2-1, with the 39s being the more prevalent car.   Being that the G-38 is similar or identical in many aspects,  a slight redesign of the CAD files enabled me to make the G-38 also.  I still have to work out the ladder, end details, and the 32 steam lance portholes.   Despite this cars simple appearance, it is very difficult to model, especially the ladders and end gear.  I believe this is because you are dealing with sloping sides, ladders that joint on the corners, and partially rest on poling bumpers, that are themselves extremely angular.   I hope, as I build more, these elements go faster.  

MODELING THE PENN CENTRAL ERA - JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I KNEW EVERYTHING ABOUT TRAINS.....

I have a vast model railroad and train magazine library that stretches back to the 60’s, so it was surprising for me that in posting about my PRR/PC G-39 Ore Jennie project on an O-Scale 2-Rail forum, someone suggested and older article in Rails Northeast magazine.   What the heck is/was Rails Northeast?  Well it turns out that it was a railfan magazine published during the 1970s, into the early 1980s.   During my college years, 1984-1988, my railfan activities really picked up and the monthly, Railpace, another north/mid eastern railfan magazine (still published today) was eagerly waited on.   So it looks like I just missed Rails Northeast by coincidence of my age and interest.   

What a great magazine,  especially for anyone modeling the 1970s and early 80s.   Compared to Railpace, it lacks color photos, except for the cover sometimes, but inside is a good mix of railroad news AND drawings, maps, operational information and schedules,..etc..   A lot helpful to a model railroader.  

O-SCALE DIGITAL FABRICATION

I’m convinced, that as niche suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors continue to close up shop in the model railroad world, digital fabrication will be our salvation.  There are already a number of fabricators offering excellent parts and kits, in steel mill modeling, and On30.  In smaller scales, where Shapeway type parts are sort of economical, there is a vast array available.    Being a modeler that likes to build whatever prototype I want or see, laser cutters, 3D printers, vinyl cutters, CNC mills and routers, .etc just make things easier.   Having a robot cutting out your parts is time saving, and free’s you up for the more interesting assembly, and finishing, however, it’s not just about saving time cutting parts.  For me, where digital fabrication really shines, is in it’s precision, repeatability, and the ability to tab or mark precise part locations.   I’ll get more into all the details in future blogs, but to be sure, buying the machine is the easy part.  Without good CAD/CAM skills you’ll be handicapped quite a bit, although more and more 3D files are becoming available for free or low cost, so maybe not.    I have a laser cutter, two 3D printers - one filament and a new resin machine, and two CNC machines.   Again more on this in the future.  For now, a few O Scale projects I’m working on - an Erie DUNMORE Caboose, and a PRR G-39 Ore Jennie.  Parts are laser cut from a mix of acrylic, styrene, and Polybacker.  

O-SCALE ADVENTURES - CABEESES

In O-Scale, I am modeling the Penn Central/Penn Central era (1968-1976).  What is available in O-Scale (O-Scale, scale, ie not Lionel Tinplate type products) in plastic is fairly limited, especially compared to HO Scale.  Weaver and Atlas both produced plastic 1:48 scale locomotives, and freight/passenger cars.   Weaver is out of business now, although Atlas has produced a few of their products under their Trainman line.   There is a smattering of other plastic kits and a few resin out there, but most are steam/transition era, leaving, scratchbuilding, or semi-scratchbuilding in the form of wood/metal kits made be Athearn/Reynolds, or the Quality Craft/Ambroid/Gloor Craft lines.   The later all seem to have produced the same products, I just don’t know the exact lineage/order of these companies.   Another manufacturer, Lykens Valley Models, also produced wood kits, abet, more primitive than the Ambroid-Gloor craft kits.   All these manufacturers are long out of business, but kits can be found at eBay and train shows.  On Ebay, especially for some reason in the past two months, sellers tend to list these at very high prices and the bidding is robust.   Shows are a better source and I rarely pay over $20 for one of these kits.   Since the heyday of these companies was likely the 70s and very early 80’s, the “modern cars” they were producing kits were, are perfect for Penn Central era.   Many of the kits are fairly unique prototypes that should add some nice diversity to my freight manifests.   A quick list of some of these kits I have -  86’ Trailer Train piggy back flat with trailers; 86’ high cube box;  C&O Coil car; 89’ auto rack flats;  shorty corn syrup tank cars;  the giant Publicker tank car; all-door boxcars; Railbox type cars; 63’ mechanical refer; bulkhead flats;  heavy duty well flat car;  and then there are the cabooses.

Small portion of wood kits.

I must admit, I also have been buying these type of kits in HO, “for my old-age”, but haven’t built any yet.   I have a half dozen O-Scale freight cars underway in various stages of construction, but for some reason I’ve grown an interest in cabooses of late, and am currently building four, along with a caboose like flanger.  Getting the wood pieces in the box to look like steel is the real challenge - lots of sealing/sanding, and you still have an imperfect surface.   Even the prototype wood sided cars are not great, as the scribes on the siding are too deep.   I’m experimenting with substituting styrene or acyclic for the wood parts.  The full size plans and metal castings, more than justify the cost of the kit, and the wood can be used elsewhere.    I decided to keep things cheap and fun, and I’m building the caboose kits with the wood and other parts in the box.  

Gloor Craft PRR ND four wheel cabin car,; Quality Craft Erie wood-sided caboose; and  Ambroid Nickel Plate caboose.    Various stages of construction.

Building these kits has been a bit of a learning experience, but hopefully mistakes are only made once.  I would highly recommend trying one of these.  Some patience is required, but many hours of fun, for low cost.    None are complete yet, but I’m in the weathering phase of the Erie caboose.   All these cabooses, even the four wheel PRR were technically still around during the early part of the Penn Central era.   Photos of the Erie (Erie-Lackawanna) caboose from the late 60s show a pretty weather worn, beat up car.  It looks like they had been relegated to MOW trains.  

I’m not happy with the Erie decals, but working on camouflaging them.

CORONAVIRUS MODELING

It’s been over a year since my last post.   Life has usual been a blur of work and other things, until the Coronavirus ground the economy to a very slow crawl.  My business has been affected severely since 90% of the work we do is residential.   For the first time in over thirty years of business I have had to lay off employees, all of them to be precise.   I can afford to keep the lights on for four months or so hopefully I’m back in operation by then, however, with the react to the stock ticker government response, I’m fairly worried we could be looking at a slow bleed for longer.  I’m sure all the billionaires and their corporations that pay slave wages will make out fine.   Small businesses like mine,  always get shit on.  With or without the virus, I’ll keep on paying forty times the tax rate that Amazon does.

Well, now that I’ve aired the dirty laundry, and as the boys from Monty Python say, “always look on the bright side of life”, there is an upside - more time for model railroading.

I think in my last post, I talked about my expansion into O-Scale.  I joined a local O-Scale 2-Rail club last winter.  The Cherry Valley Model Railroad Club has been located in the basement of the Grace Episcopal Church for 56 years.   I had never been much of a club person, preferring to do my model railroading in my basement, alone, or with the help of my son.   I’ve been presently surprised, and have been having a fun time with a great group of model railroaders.   Having a specific meeting night every week has more or less “forced” me to play with trains - not a bad thing.   With owning your own business, there always seems to be something you could be doing, especially when your shop has months of backlog, and it’s easy to just work more hours and forget about the fun things in your life.   With Cherry Valley, I almost always get in three to four hours of model railroading a week.  Sometimes its just running trains, sometimes working on the layout, and plenty of times just shooting the shit about trains, etc.   Those of you who know me personally, know I’m pretty skilled at the last item.  

What about steel mill modeling?  Unfortunately, I haven’t worked on my layout much - why?  Besides the time issue,  honestly, it’s covered with O Scale cars and locomotives that I am building, painting, decaling, and weathering.   To be fair, I went a bit overboard gearing up for O Scale, and have purchased at least 90 cars or car kits and probably a dozen locomotives over the course of a year and a half.   I’m also doing what I have never really done in HO scale - for each locomotive or car, I’m painting, decaling,  weathering, weighting, coupler height adjusting, decoder installing, before it gets brought to Cherry Valley.    As most of you know, my basement is really small, so the only place I can set my rolling stock is on my HO Steel mill layout.   O Scale cars and locos are twice as long, high, and wide as H.O., but that also mean four times the volume.    I’m building a work room/ O Scale shelf layout in an old garage attached to my house (not really a garage - 7’x20’)   When this is finished, I’ll be able to move all my work up there, and also have space to properly work on my large HO steel mill structures.

Moving on I am going to try to update this blog more regularly.  If I go back in it’s history, the times I was most prolific with the posts, were also the times I did the most modeling.   I’m also going to post some of my O-Scale modeling in this blog.  The techniques and methods are transferable to any scale.   I’ll title the posts with O-SCALE EXPLORATIONS, so if you don’t want to read, you can skip.  I’ve posted photos some of my O Scale freight car weathering projects.

Everyone stay safe and healthy.

STEEL MILL MODELING RESOURCE - SUBMARINE HOT METAL CARS

I came upon a good resource for steel mill modelers, especially for those modeling the transition era like I am.  

William Gaughan Collection - Historic Pittsburgh

It's about 600 photos, mostly of the US Steel Homestead Works, and their associated, Carrie Furnaces.    The subject matter ranges from people photos, wartime events,  buildings, processes, equipment, a few aerial photos, ..etc..   Something for everyone.

It did solve one mystery for me.  When I had a tour of the Carrie Works six or seven years ago, I asked the guide, who had worked in the blast furnace department there, when they switched from the open top hot metal cars to the submarine or torpedo type.  He thought the mid 60s.    There is a classic railfan photo of a string of open top, Kling type 50 ton hot metal cars being pulled across the hot metal bridge while I think it's a B&O train moving under the bridge.   Based on the F units I figured it was a 1950s photo.   According to this photo collection, the first submarine car was put in service in 1958 at Homestead/Carrie.   Photo of the inaugural pour at the open hearth.

UPDATE, Long overdue

On Saturday I hosted an open house layout tour for New Jersey Division of the NMRA.   As Jimmy and myself were vacuuming and cleaning the tracks of our layout, I realized that the last time it had run was two years previous at another open house - January of 2017.   The layout ran fine, abet without looking much different than the last time some of the people visited.   I’d been down in the basement about a half dozen or so times over that same time span, but just to build a plastic non-railroad model kit or two or three.   Of course I have stayed current as an arm chair modeler via the Facebook Steel Mill Modeler’s group of all the happenings in that world.  It’s been nice to see so much good modeling.

What’s been going on?  Well the short answer is life.   My business grew quite a bit, peaking in terms of number of employees and number of jobs we were doing at once, around this time last year.  Since then I have downsized, not for lack of work, but rather for my own sanity.  I’m running with a much smaller team.  During this “downsizing” I upsized my shop facility and invested in more equipment.    We moved across a parking lot, into an old factory building that originally made aluminum TV dinner trays and pie plates.   Our square footage tripled.   Not wanting to make some of the mistakes I’d made in several previous shops, I was careful with the layout to allow for maximum efficiency.  Moving our office, materials, and equipment took about two weeks via a forklift, however, setting up the shop, installing the electric, air, dust collection,....etc. and all the benches, shelving etc. has taken from August and continues, although the to-do list left is down to a page or two, and things are mostly fully functional.  Just when I should have had more time on my hands, hundred, but more likely thousands of hours were spent just setting things up, primarily nights and weekends.    The good news is that I’m recently feeling I have more spare time, or at least can take time away for myself without feeling guilty.  

My personal life has been equally hectic.  In the past year, both my children bought their own houses and moved out of mine.  My daughter got married almost a year ago, but as you can imagine, wedding planing, parties and showers, etc,  took up most of last fall.   Wedding went off without a hitch, despite a late January date.  My daughter wanted snow for it, but we got balmy 60 degree sunny weather.    My daughter, who is one of those people that asks, where we are going for dinner while eating breakfast, promptly got pregnant, and as of this past October 30th, I have a Grandson.   I’m sure the little guy is going to be into trains....  

Even before we’d become empty nesters, I’d been talking to my wife about possibly moving to a bigger basement, with a house on it, or alternatively, an apartment in the city of Philadelphia.  This put work on the layout on hold.  Also, even if we stayed put, I’d considered ripping everything out and starting over with a better planned layout.    In the end we are staying put.  I think I was duped by my wife with the offer of a second train room (after I relocate the laundry room that takes up part of it, and renovate about 60 percent of the rest of the house).    This new train room will feature an O-Scale 2 Rail (ie not Lionel)  Penn Central switching layout, set in the early 70s in the swamps of New Jersey’s Chemical Coast.   More on O-Scale later.      Besides staying put in our house of 27 years, we bought land on the side of a mountain in Jim Thorpe, PA for a family vacation house.  The construction of this, which Jimmy and myself will be doing the bulk of.   Jim Thorpe is a beautiful little town in the Lehigh River Gorge.  It was originally named Mauch Chunk, before the town purchased the body of the famous athlete Jim Thorpe and changed the name of the town,  and was one of the commercial centers of the American industrial revolution.   Anthracite coal mined in the mountains to the west of the city was moved through Mauch Chunk to market, using canal and railroad technology developed to do so.   The Central Railroad of New Jersey and the Lehigh Valley Railroad ran through town on alternative sides of the river, and the Lehigh Valley had a large coal marshaling yard in town at one point.   The railroads through town are still use for freight and a fairly busy, year round tourist railroad.    The town is an outdoor sports Mecca of sorts today, with whitewater rafting on the river, bike trails on abandoned rail beds,  hiking on mountain trials, and nearby ski areas.   The tourist railroad has a dedicated gondola for transporting bicycles north twenty miles, where the riders disembark and ride down the side of the gorge back into town.   The CNJ pulled out of Pennsylvania in I think the 70s and the LV altered their main line to use the parallel CNJ where more efficient.   Fortunately for hikers and bicyclists, the abandoned main sections could only be placed close to the river due to the steep sides of the gorge, making for some nice scenery.   We are hoping to start building in the spring or summer.

Looking over my layout Saturday I started making a list of projects.  Besides the obvious, “when are you going to finish some structures”.   I need to take some time to properly wire the layout, and make some track improvements in a few locations for smoother switching.    Hopefully there will be some blog posts in the near future on this.    Also, I’ll be including my O-Scale adventures.   Stay tuned.  Jim