Last year, I showed the starting steps in a project to add a 50-foot Viking roof to an automobile car body to model a Chicago & North Western prototype (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-simple-freight-car-kitbash.html ).
I had on hand a pair of Cannonball Car Shops original Dreadnaught ends which I could apply to match the C&NW prototype. Shortening those ends and applying them to a Branchline 50-foot body was shown in a second post (it is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/08/freight-car-kitbash-part-2.html ). But at about that time, I discovered I already possessed such a C&NW car, that I inherited. This led to some head-scratching. What other road would have had Viking-roofed 50-foot auto cars?
The one that came to mind was the Erie, another road that evidently liked the Viking roof, so I contacted eminent Erie modeler Schuyler Larrabee to ask about prototypes. It took him a while to dig into the question, but he came back to me with the information that, yes, Erie did have some cars like that. In fact, not only is a builder photo in the 1940 Car Builders Cyclopedia (page 147) but so are the plans, confirming the Viking roof and also showing that the ends were Hutchins — and not just Hutchins, but inverse Hutchins.
Originally these were Erie 68200–28299. Here is the Cyc photo; doors appear black on the as-delivered car. In later repaints, the black doors were not continued, and I want to model the car in post-1947 paint, with the 6-foot Erie diamond emblem.
Turns out that Chad Boas has now produced an inverse Hutchins end, so that should enable me to convert my kitbash into an Erie automobile car. I ordered a pair, and they are shown below as I received them. They don’t have a top section, making them usable for both round-roof and peaked-roof cars, with the modeler making a top section from strip or sheet styrene to suit the model.
Previously I had applied Dreadnaught ends to my model, as described earlier, so my first step was to remove those ends. There I discovered yet another advantage of canopy glue, the adhesive used to attach the previous ends: since it doesn’t attack or bond with the styrene car body, it can be peeled off from the interface (for more about canopy glue, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-few-words-in-praise-of-canopy-glue.html ).
Then I used Evergreen styrene strip, 6 scale inches thick, to make top sections by cutting and filing to fit. Once those strips were made, and ends cleaned up, they could be attached, once again with canopy glue. A rubber band made sure ends remained in correct alignment as the glue sets. Here the recessed panels in the inverse Hutchins end are evident.
Next I repeated the step of adding ladders to the car body, and returned to my extensive stash of freight car parts, much of it inherited from Richard Hendrickson. For this car, I chose some old Front Range ladders with the right width, which happened to be molded in orange, and attached them with canopy glue:
Next steps include addition of grab irons, sill steps, and B-end brake gear. I might mention that the car kit that is the foundation for this project is a Branchline, now some years old, and most of the detail parts in the kit are now so brittle that they can’t even be removed from the sprues by a sprue cutter without breaking them. Other parts are being substituted. I will return to detailing steps in a future post.
Tony Thompson
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