Still more open-top car loads

I have written several posts about making and using removable loads for open-top cars, both bulk materials like coal, ore and sand, and then also materials like pipe and lumber, that have to be restrained by spacers and stakes. And then there are various kinds of crates and other packages which can be interesting loads. These previous posts are readily found by using the search term “open-top cars” in the search box at right.
     In the present post, I want to show a few more examples of different kinds of these loads. I have mentioned pipe loads in several earlier posts, including showing how I make most of them from drinking straws or coffee stirrers (see, for example, this post: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/01/open-car-loads-pipe-in-gondolas.html ). I have deliberately arranged these various loads with different kinds of stake restraints, following prototype photos, with some additional guidance from the AAR Loading Rules booklets. (Either I don’t fully understand those rules — certainly possible — or else those rules were not always obeyed). Here is an example of another of these pipe loads, also made from plastic straws.

The gondola, SP 160185, is a Tangent model of SP Class G-70-12 which, having been built in 1953, the year I model, is portrayed as almost clean.
     As I have mentioned in previous posts, there are some good commercial loads that can either be used as-is, or modified to fit particular cars. Shown below is a Chooch molded load depicting coils of wire. It did not fit into this gondola, and had to be cut and trimmed so that it would work. It is seen here in Reading 25034, a re-detailed USRA gondola from Walthers, modeling Reading class GML.

Another example of a commercial load, modified to fit some of my freight cars, is this cable reel set, though I have owned it for so long I no longer remember the manufacturer. Here the gondola, NYC 707698, is again a re-detailed Walthers USRA steel gondola.

     I have shown girder loads before in this blog, and continue to enjoy them as excellent examples of loads the railroads were (in the transition era) uniquely equipped to carry. I have made a couple of such loads by kitbashing Atlas bridge girders, and recently adopted one such load for a 65-foot mill gondola. The bracing is one of the arrangements shown in the AAR Loading Rules. Such a load has no reasonable destination on my layout, but instead moves in mainline trains that simply pass by on the SP Coast Route.

The gondola, a model of PRR Class G26, is built from an E&B Valley kit. You may note that the car’s top chord has some bends and dents, as was common in mill gondolas; these were accomplished with gentle use of a warm soldering iron.
     Sometimes upright girders like the one shown above were more extensively braced. Richard Hendrickson built such a set of bracing for one of his loads that I inherited, as you see below. It is a girder from a Central Valley bridge kit.

This girder was built to be overlength even for a 65-foot gondola, and thus to overhang one end of the car. An idler flat car would be coupled here, of course, during car movement to destination. Richard built two of these girders, so that he could model a group of cars loaded with bridge components (I showed the entire group in a previous post, which is at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/03/richard-hendricksons-multi-car-loads.html .)

This gondola, CRP 89065, is a Precision Scale brass model. The CRP was a Central of New Jersey subsidiary.
     Lastly, I will show a pair of crates, made to ride on a flat car. They are marked for Lucifer Furnaces, a company in Pennsylvania. The flat car is an upgraded Athearn 40-footer, with new Tuttle sill steps, wire grab irons, and a vertical-staff handbrake. You can click to enlarge the image.

     All these loads are part of the variety I like to include in my open-top cars. In the transition era, which I model, there was such a preponderance of house cars that these visible loads make a nice change from the remainder of most trains.
Tony Thompson