Seems alot of people forget about sand at yards and the useage in the steam era. I see extremely detailed cars and layouts and no sand in hoppers or sand piles in layouts . And how about tunnel ice breakers made from hoppers. An example is below very simple but I never see any :
And I’ll bet nobody ever saw a flanger like this old girl !
Those are neat cars. I think Denver could really use that plow car now!!
Here is a photo of my loco yard with coal tower and sandtower and sand box and pump building. Bachman Plus had an HO kit that I built when I was in HO. I just doubled the measurements and made these from scratch. I have not posted photos in a while so I hope this works.
Nice picture.
Picture now shows. Deleted [*]'s
Sorry. You fixed it while I was jumping in. Looks great!
Ken
Great photos. I’ve got a sand tower I will be putting in my diesel area.
Lionel made icebreaker cars - you can see a 16466 PRR icebreaker car on their website. Of course, if you’re not a PRR fan, there are a lot of things you can do with Plastruct.[;)]
All my hoppers have sand in them, I don’t model an area that would necessarily have coal in it, so I figured having sand in them is realistic enough and gives some weight to the car.
I have several small sand piles around the layout as well!
If you’re modling the Florida line, FEC I think, sand is a must. When I’ve visited my sister down in Boca, she’s a block from the main line, the predominant north bound freight is hoppers of sand.
Being the huge CONRAIL fan that I am and being that road gets igrnored on traditionally sized trains, I made my own flanger car. Conrail used a number of cabooses and bunk cars for this purpose with blades underneath. Conrail painted these cars yellow, so I have a yellow Conrail caboose as a flanger car. Depite first impressions, Conrail was far more colorful than most realize with many Penn Central green colored box cars (ironically they only had one experimental CR blue box car), orange and yellow MOW cars (and also grey, brown, a very pale blue and black) plus yellow snow removal cars, and also grey local MOW service cabooses and cars. I’ve seen some other odd ball variations too like bright red MOW cars. There were also some late issue bright red cabooses. Most of these cars are now represented on my layout. Sand in train cars is pretty heavy. I use in gondolas and in hoppers that have a fake riser floor made from foam core board cut to fit in easily to the hoppers and color matched. This way there isn’t as much sand, so the cars aren’t as heavy. Though the real railroads carried sand mostly in covered hoppers, which may explain why you don’t see hoppers full of sand on model trains. The Lionel 2-bad starter set Reading green hopper from a couple years ago was done after an actual Reading car, but it should have been a covered hopper as that’s what the Reading did use. Oh well, most toy train guys don’t care about such details. When I custom paint my own hoppers, I have made color matched covers for them. I’ve also made some replicas of the “Tupperware” tops developed by the Chessie and also used for a short while on Conrail. And easy way to turn an open hopper or gondola into a covered one that actyally has some prototypical merit.
Brian,
You’ve posted photos of your excellent re-paints before, but I’ve never seen any photos of your layout. Please consider posting some.
Jim
Oh yes, I would like to second that !! Thanks, John
Well now that I’m working, that thought has entered my mind. Believe me, none of you guys want to go through the h-e-c-k that I went through!! It’s taken me a bit to climb out of the hole and I’m still watching my money like a hungry hawk watching a rodent in a field. Back in June there was some real severe flooding in my area. My church volunteered to help out, which was a hoot when folks showed up at the FEMA office and they had no clue what was going on. Anyways, I had some bad water damage too and a serious roof leak in of all places, directly above my old train layout. I decided then to scrounge up some blue insulation styrofoam (less than pristine pieces from a lumber yard) and construct a truly lightweight layout I could move totally by myself. So I am in the process of doing that and it has been an enlightening learning experience. Small challlenges, but nothing I haven’t been able to quickly overcome. I think styrofoam layouts are the wave of the future, at least as far as smaller moveable layouts go. In this economy of ours, jobs don’t last the way they once did and having a layout that is easy to move is not only a blessing within a home (if you get water into your train room) but a blessing should the job picutre change. BOY do I have empathy for those folks living in towns where Ford is going to close plants - especially if Ford is the premiere employer in that town.
brianel027 at my age I’ve been there and back many times . From almost penniless to rolling in it and back to rubbing 2 dimes together at times . That’s life and it makes you appreciate it when it’s good . I can remember when I could’nt buy a job when I was young . Thank the lord the wife and I are set pretty good now . As long as they don’t bankrupt social security that is !
Hey, just a quick add to this post…
While in some of the older yards you’ll find sand towers for the diesels…our locomotives get filled with sand from a funky looking truck. It pipes sand up into the sander tanks. If there is interest, I’ll try and get a pic of it next time…