A fine-toothed hobby saw was used to scribe a maple block (above left) to make “boards,” visible above right on the com- pleted load. Board ends were added using a knife to cut them into the ends of the blocks. Although the load on this car is not removable, that could easily be done.
wrapped with paper. Scribing blocks seemed faster than gluing together 15 hollow bundles, so I did that. Balsa would be too soft for the kind of han- dling the car would receive. Pine was hard enough, but over time it would darken when exposed to light. I used scraps of maple that a neighbor offered, figuring it would retain a lighter, recent- ly sawed appearance. The scraps were already very close to three and four scale feet tall. We ripped those strips to just over half the width of the car. The 40-foot flat car carries two stacks,
each three bundles tall, reaching just over 14 feet above the railhead when the 2″×4″ stickers (spacers) between bun- dles and the cross ties on top of the load are in place. I sanded two long maple strips until they fit snugly side by side between the 4″×4″’s set in the flatcar stake pockets. This left enough room to squeeze 2″×4″ spacers down the center of the car to separate the stacks. Order- ing lumber in mixed lengths was cheap- er, hence more common than uniformly sized loads. I cut the strips into scale 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 and 20-foot lengths with a hobby saw and miter box, making sure the combined lengths for each layer to- taled 40 feet. Following Paul and Greg’s technique, I dragged the outside face of each piece against the fine teeth of a hobby saw to represent stacks of two-inch boards. The tops of the uppermost bundles were
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
also scribed with a coarser saw for four- or six-inch wide boards. That took sev- eral passes with a lot of pressure against the teeth to engrave noticeable lines down the length of the maple, so consider balsa or boxwood for your own layout. Going with the grain kept the grooves cleaner, but occasionally the wood did get fuzzy. I got rid of that by rubbing on a very thin coat of matte acrylic
varnish. Heavy coatings will
swell the wood, so if you do this, go lightly. The tip of a toothpick removed any fuzz left in the grooves.
The visible ends of bundles were in- cised with a single-edge razor blade both vertically and horizontally to cre- ate separate columns and rows of indi- vidual “boards.” To give them a some- what staggered look, the back end of a No. 11 blade was pressed into each board, sometimes lightly, other times harder. I also repeated the razor cuts in a few random places along the sides to vary those gaps.
Since the maple had almost no grain, a few individual boards were picked out with thin washes of watercolor and colored pencils. Tiny pine knots were added with a sienna Micron Pigma® marker. Diluted ink and alcohol wash- es added the sooty appearance seen in the Delano photo. To keep each half of the load togeth-
er, each top layer was laid out upside- down on double-sided tape and HO
scale 2″×4″ stripwood stickers were glued two feet in from each bundle end and about four feet apart along the rest of the strip. A middle layer was clamped upside-down on top of that and pilot holes were drilled for small panel nails to tie the stacks together. I also applied glue between them. The bottom layer was added the same way. Hammering in the panel nails crushed the stripwood 2″×4″ stickers between the layers, but the spaces were re- opened by carefully prying them with a utility knife blade before the glue set. To provide more surface area for glu- ing both stacks to the flatcar, a piece of manila file folder, the same thickness as the 2″×4″ stripwood stickers, was cut a little shorter and narrower than the load and glued to the deck. A full car-width 2″×4″ sticker was glued next to each end of the cardstock to hide it, and stub stickers were spaced proportionally along each side. Then the stacks were glued and clamped in place, leaving just enough room be- tween them along the centerline to wiggle vertical 2″×4″’s into place. Next, 4″×4″ posts were cut for the stake pockets. Until then I had not thought about locating the stakes. For- tunately, even though each side of the car had different length bundles, the spacing looked planned.
A few stakes were leaned slightly fore or aft to match the photos. The stakes were carefully glued to the sides of the stacks with dots of cyanoacrylate, then 2″×4″ crossties were glued across the top of the load with 2″×4″ spacers standing down the centerline between the ties. Any glue spots were scraped away and touched up with matte var- nish. That completed this load.
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