PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
A pair of F-units working in helper service shove hard on ca- boose 843 as its train works upgrade. As a safety precaution, the
Lackawanna’s practice would be to have the crew of the caboose riding in one of the trailing units during this operation.
Modeling the DL&W’s eight wheel, wood caboose
It’s not hard to model this steam-era classic, which was designed for the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western and later used on shortlines across North America/Scott Lupia
C
abooses are strange little crit- ters. Every railroad had their own idea of what a caboose should be and how it should look. Be- cause of this, fans of smaller railroads generally don’t have much to go on when it comes to modeling the caboos- es of their favorite road. Scratchbuild- ing or kitbashing always seems to be inevitable. When I read Mike Del Vec- chio’s article on the DL&W wood-sided caboose and its rich history, I realized that this was one of those rare exam- ples of a unique caboose having a far reaching influence on the railroad in- dustry. These cabooses were sold to railroads across the country and some even ended up in Mexico. A one-hit- wonder, this caboose was not! Shortline Models recently purchased the Sparrows Point Division line of ca- booses from Bethlehem Car Works. Kit
74
SP-19 is an HO scale DL&W wood sided caboose and, with modification, can pro- duce any of the ex-DL&W cabooses sold to the other railroads. Shortline Models should have the caboose ready for the modeling community by late summer. The kit is currently being altered and upgraded to produce an even better looking model. I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of these new kits. (For more information on this caboose kit, check out the Shortline Models website:
www.shortlinemodelproducts.com.) As this is a wood-sided caboose, the
kit is, not surprisingly, made of laser- cut wood parts. This is where some modelers might tend to shy away. Working with wood kits is not diffi- cult. It is similar to working with styrene or injection molded plastic. Some of the rules and methods are a bit different, but a nice finished prod-
uct is very achievable if the modeler keeps this in mind.
I opened the box containing all of the
parts and started sorting them out into different piles. I wanted to make sure that all of the parts were present and that I knew what each part was. Famil- iarity with the parts prior to starting the build process is essential to com- pleting the model successfully. Once the parts were sorted, I read through the directions and familiarized myself with the process. Doing this will take some of the guesswork out of the build- ing process. There is nothing worse than stopping to think about what goes where while parts are sitting in the tweezers with cyanoacrylate applied to them.
The first step of the building process is to seal all of the wood parts. I used Krylon Crystal Clear Varnish. Spray-
AUGUST 2013
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