Tank car projects for Cocoa Beach

For my talk on tank cars at Cocoa Beach (Florida) in January, I will report on several upgrades of commercial model tank cars (some of which were described at the NMRA convention last July in Milwaukee). New in January will be the following:
     • A General American 8000-gallon car, modeled by placing an InterMountain tank of that size on a shortened Athearn tank car frame. The Athearn frame, though not very refined in its detailing, is nevertheless a generally accurate General American underframe.
     • An AC&F insulated 10,000 gallon car, modeled by cutting an Athearn insulated tank body down in length, and placing it on the frame of the InterMountain car just described. The IM underframe is an AC&F design. The Athearn car body is intended to represent a pressurized or ICC 105 type of tank car, but the prototype being modeled is an insulated but not pressurized car, ICC type 104, so a new dome had to be made also.
     • A 6000-gallon car, with a slender dome like an acid car but in this case for shipping hydrogen peroxide by the Buffalo Electrochemical Company (Becco), modeled with a Tichy underframe and scratchbuilt tank from Plastruct tubing (body) and aluminum tubing (dome).
     The latter project may sound familiar, since years ago Mark Feddersen published a fine article about doing such a car with a similar method. And in fact the tank portion of the ICC 104 project draws on another Feddersen article, though he used a different frame method and was modeling a different prototype. Mark’s ideas were certainly an inspiration as well as instructive for me. Here are his two articles:
Mark Feddersen, “ICC-104 Insulated Tank Car,” Mainline Modeler, October 1985, pp. 63-69.
Mark Feddersen, “The Becco peroxide tank car,” Prototype Modeler, January 1986, pp. 16-19.
     What I’ll do in forthcoming posts is report on some of the challenges (and solutions) in these projects, and provide a summary of a few of the upgrades which I did earlier. I’ll include some photos of the cars.
     You may ask, is this about SP modeling? In two ways, yes. First, of course, any layout with ordinary freight service needs freight cars of all kinds, whatever the home road is. But second, an entire fleet of SP tank cars is indeed among those upgrades, and I'll show photos of them too.
Tony Thompson