Open-car loads of various vehicles

I have posted many times about open-car loads, and often about military vehicles. Today I’m not talking about the military ones, but about other kinds of vehicles, including rail vehicles. There was a similar post about five years ago (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/06/railroad-equipment-on-flat-cars.html ).

In that previous post, I showed one of my Scottish locomotive models, a Caledonian Railway tank engine, on a flat car. Since it has its livery from before the 1923 “Grouping,” in which fully 120 British railways were grouped into four largely regional companies, one could presume it was en route to display at a museum. I might mention that the model is OO scale, not HO, and thus larger than it should be in an HO setting.

The same can be done with my model of a Highland Railway locomotive, HR no. 2, Ben Alder. This 4-4-0 was built in 1898, to a design by then-new Locomotive Superintendent Peter Drummond, and not only survived the Grouping, becoming London Midland & Scottish 14398, but even survived the British Railways takeover of all British lines in 1948, becoming BR 54398, and continuing in service until 1953.

Below is a photo of sister locomotive HR 3, Ben Wyvis, at Perth, circa 1920, the locomotive at right (R.D. Stephen photo). The livery you see here is not the original 19th century scheme, but a simplified, solid dark green livery, with the tender simply lettered “H R.” 

My model, built from a DJH kit has the fully lined 19th century livery, thus the locomotive could only be en route to display of some form.

The locomotive plus tender are almost 60 scale feet long in HO, so rail shipping would likely be most convenient as two separate vehicles, in the manner you see below. This is an extra train, which would operate over the division at low speed to deliver the historic cargo.

Another example is a mine car being shipped to a new owner. It’s lettered for the old owner, Cove Creek Stone, and is an A-frame dump car. At the right end of the car in the photo below is a conventional hand brake; on the other end is a crank handle for the dump doors. This is an example of using different flat cars with the removable rail arrangement; this load was shown on flat car SP 140558 in the post cited in the first paragraph, above.

Note that rails have been spiked to the deck of the flat car. There certainly exist photos of rail equipment being shipped this way. What about narrow gauge equipment? I could of course make a separate, new version of what you see above, at 3-foot gauge, but I decided instead to simply add a third rail to the arrangement above, to accommodate such loads. 

Another rail vehicle that might well be shipped this way is a group of speeders. I posted a description of these models, Fairmont M-19, 3D-printed by Ken Harstine, in an earlier blog post (you can see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/07/speeders-or-are-they-motor-cars.html ). I have omitted tie-downs here because they are rather small in HO scale.

Another example is a hot-metal car, destined to the Jupiter Pump & Compressor plant in my layout town of Ballard. This model Pollock hot-metal car was described in a previous post (it can be viewed at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/10/a-pollock-hot-metal-car-part-2.html ), and it makes a good example of an exceptional load that calls for special handling. 

Each of these loads is a particularly eye-catching part of any operating session, so although I enjoy including them, I also make sure not to include them too often. They should be perceived as the unusual events that they are.

Tony Thompson