Mishaps do happen

Some years ago, I described the creation of a stand-in version of a Southern Pacific postal-storage car, in two blog posts. The concluding one is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/08/modeling-sp-head-end-cars-part-7b.html . The goal was to produce something like the car shown below, photographed at Council Bluffs, in 1954 (Clark Bauer collection). This was an EP&SW 60-foot postal car, remodeled by SP into a postal-storage configuration. 

I approximated this car by cutting up an Athearn RPO model, to get the right overall appearance, although as I mentioned in showing the modeling process, the size and location of windows in my model don’t exactly match the photo above. The modeling work was described here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/07/modeling-sp-head-end-cars-part-7a.html . This was the finished model: 

So why is it coming up now? A derailment in a recent operating session resulted in the floor/underframe part of the model separating into two parts. That was the mishap, seen below. Obviously it wasn’t as well glued together as I thought. So what now? 

The steel weight on the right-hand section in the photo above would have been good to remove, but it evidently is well glued to the floor section of that part of the car. Instead, I cut two lengths of 1/4 x 1/8-inch styrene (Evergreen #389) and glued them to the inside rails of the sides of both parts, across the gap, using Plastruct “Plastic Weld” cement and clamping. The two sections now appear to be quite solidly joined.

I next painted the white styrene reinforcements black. At this point, the car could be re-assembled. It is now back in service, as I show below, in a passenger train behind Class P-4 Pacific SP 2402, passing the Shumala depot on my layout. 

Accidents like derailments or other kinds of things do occur, and they just have to be dealt with. I thought it might be of interest to see my method of correcting this one.

Tony Thompson