loads for cars/gondela's

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

Hi everyone, Its been a while since being here in the forums. Been working on the layout and its slowly coming along.

A while back I was looking thru another train forum and came across a thread of different things you could use for your gondola cars, high sided gondola’s and coal load type cars. I cant located the thread now, but wanted to pass on a few I could remember and if others had some they could or wanted to pass along. Like many times are tough and ways we can get our train budgets to stretch further I am all for.

Couple of them I remember is you can take your soda drinking straw, and depending on the color you can paint them and they could be done to look like pipes. Another was to left over pvc pipe fittings and end caps as various kinds of load to resemble things like 500 gallon water tanks. Another suggestion was to take beer bottle caps and the can be crushed to remember things coming from a metal scrap yard, etc.

2

This has been the subject of several past threads. A few of the odder balls, taken from my posts to those threads:

  • Glass cullet/broken mirrors (old DVDs chopped in blender.)
  • Assembled turnout, propped up on edge.
  • Pit props (AKA wooden matchsticks.)
  • Mystery shape under a tarpaulin.

In earlier times, when things were shipped in wooden crates, a cube of wood with some stripwood and black pen-line ‘banding’ could have been labeled almost anything inanimate.

Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with removable gon loads keyed to waybills)