New tank car article in RMC

I’ve finally received in the mail my copy of the January 2012 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman (RMC), containing my article on tank car modeling (pages 61-66). The article describes two tank car models, a Stauffer Chemical Company acid car, and a Buffalo Electro Chemical Company (Becco) peroxide car. These were first mentioned almost a year ago in this blog, in a description of the modeling projects I was taking to display at the annual Prototype Rails meeting in Cocoa Beach, Florida (see: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2010/12/tank-car-projects-for-cocoa-beach.html ). Following that meeting, I posted photos of the models which had been displayed, including the ones in the RMC article, and those are at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/01/tank-car-projects-for-cocoa-beach-2.html .
     I was tempted to summarize in a blog post the model-building process for these two cars, but Bill Schaumburg, editor of Railroad Model Craftsman, was interested in an article for the magazine, so I wrote it up from that perspective. Whether an Internet description of the same models would in any way compete with the printed magazine, I don’t know, but it seemed to me that a single submission and presentation was a more ethical approach.
     I also want to acknowledge again the inspiration of Mark Feddersen’s tank car articles, fully 25 years ago. There were two of them, and I’ve now done models derived from both of his projects, although with somewhat different modeling approaches. Here are citations to Mark’s magazine 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. 

It’s the second of these articles which inspired my models in the January 2012 RMC, but the first article was part of the inspiration for my previous RMC article on tank cars, in July 2011, pages 65-71. Some comments and further details about that article were posted earlier in this blog; you can read them at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/06/tank-car-modeling.html .
     Additional tank car posts in this blog include my scratchbuilding project of an asymmetrical tank car with two compartments, which is at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/06/tank-car-modeling-2.html , and a description of my method of modeling Southern Pacific tank cars from Athearn models (revised from an SP Society Trainline article), which can be found at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/05/modeling-sp-tank-cars.html .

     Anyway, it’s nice to be in print in RMC again. I continue to work on tank car modeling projects, and I plan to describe them in future posts.

Tony Thompson