Another Hendrickson project

In addition to the many freight cars I inherited from Richard Hendrickson, there were also a considerable number (over 200) of resin and plastic freight car kits. The great majority of these I auctioned on-line through the Steam Era Freight Cars list. Of his roughly 250 completed car models, I gave away about half to Richard’s many friends and admirers, and kept the balance. But there were also several freight car projects in progress.

[For anyone who does not know, or has forgotten, who Richard Hendrickson was, it might be of interest to read the memorial essay of tribute I wrote after he passed away in June 2014. That essay can be found here: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/07/in-memoriam-richard-hendrickson.html .] 

One of the projects was an interesting kitbash, using parts of at least four different kits, making a Santa Fe automobile car; I described completing it (see the concluding post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/11/hendrickson-auto-car-part-6.html ). Another was a 65-foot gondola re-detailing project, which I described in a post some years ago (it is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/07/an-interesting-hendrickson-gondola.html ). Yet another project was a W&LE gondola, which I completed awhile ago and described in a post (you can find the post at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/05/completing-richard-hendrickson-freight.html ). 

The latest one to come to light (and I confess it had been stored where I didn’t expect it) is a Tichy kit for a Georgia Railroad rebuilt USRA single-sheathed car. Richard had begun work on it, but it was well short of finished. This was an attractive project and I decided to complete it. 

Here is a brief prototype history: the Georgia received 300 USRA box cars, built by Haskell & Barker in late 1918 and early 1919, numbered GA 19000–19299. Then, as happened with a number of USRA cars in later years on several railroads, the Georgia rebuilt these cars in the late 1930s and into the 1940s to replace deteriorated wood sheathing, and the original Murphy roofs, which tended to fail at the outer end of the carlines. The rebuilt cars were renumbered 19500-19799. In the April 1940 Official Railway Equipment Register, over half the cars had been rebuilt.

The Georgia had upgraded these cars by welding steel sheathing to the insides of the steel body framing, replacing the wood sheathing, and on most of the cars, added new shop-built roofs. They also replaced the original wood doors with Youngstown corrugated steel doors, and replaced side grab iron rows with ladders. There are two articles containing information about these cars: Richard Hendrickson’s article in Model Railroading, Vol. 17, January 1987, pp. 9–15, and Patrick Wider’s article in Railway Prototype Cyclopedia, Vol. 17, 2008, pp. 1–51.

The photo below is representative of these cars in the 1950s. The features described above are evident. The cars did retain their original underframes and Andrews trucks, and the 5-5-5 corrugated steel ends, but were upgraded with AB brakes and power handbrake gear. (Photo dated January 1954, but no location or photographer identified. Bob’s Photo collection)

The cars became famous far beyond their meager numbers (originally 300 cars) because in the late 1950s they were painted in a gaudy silver scheme, with black roof, ends and doors. But prior to that time, they  were painted in workaday boxcar red, as the photo above shows. Richard intended to paint his model that way, because there were white decals in the kit box, and I will too.

Richard had assembled the basic body and had modified the roof to resemble the shop-built style used on these cars, with a minimal seam between panels. He represented this by adding a 0.010-inch styrene rod at each seam. In the photo below, the model rests on the Tichy “assembly feet.”

The underframe had been begun but not advanced very far, so that is the starting point for my work on the kit. Richard had omitted the train line, as he ordinarily did on freight cars, considering it to be essentially invisible. 

My first step, as stated, is to complete the underbody, including AB brakes, and then to continue with addition of details on the upper part of the car body. But I’ll describe any interesting parts of that process in a future post. 

Tony Thompson