Building a Yarmouth Model Works kit

I recently agreed to build a Yarmouth Model Works kit for a friend, perhaps a natural move for a self-confessed “freight car guy” (for background on that, consult this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/10/whats-freight-car-guy.html ), but I will confess there was drinking involved. At any rate, he sent me the kit, and I started work on it. More on that in a moment. 

Meanwhile, Pierre Oliver, the proprietor of Yarmouth, decided to call it quits, partly over the tensions and business complexities between the United States and Canada. This is a great loss to the hobby (though some hold out hope that Pierre may return some day when things are quieter), and I am very much among those who regret the loss of not only some outstanding products, but the vision of a creative craftsman’s mind and hands.

Back to the kit. It models one of the 50-foot single-sheathed box cars that Great Northern rebuilt in 1953 and 1954 into all-steel cars with either single or double doors. This kit, Yarmouth #140, is for a single-door car. Below is a prototype photo from the Staffan Ehnbom collection of one of these cars, in the paint scheme I will be doing

Here are the one-piece body and the one-piece floor and underframe, with a pair of 5/8-11 steel nuts glued on top of the floor with canopy glue to provide weight.

Once the underframe and floor have been carefully filed to fit into the car body, they can be glued together. I used canopy glue. Then the holes for coupler box and bolster screws are tapped for 2-56 screws.

The first set of detailing tasks is to build the underframe. It is abundantly clear from the kit instructions that this kit in not intended for the inexperienced, as only rather general guidance is provided for most steps. Of course, this should be “red meat” for a freight car guy. Or so I hoped. 

Because of the deep center sill that survived from the single-sheathed predecessor car, most brake rigging and piping would not be visible from the side of the car. Accordingly, I chose to install only the levers and rigging, along with brake equipment. As you can see below, I also installed coupler boxes for the Kadee couplers to come.

Next, I began to address the body detailing. I had already agreed with the kit owner that I could omit building the beautiful but fussy and tedious Yarmouth ladders, so I needed to add suitable seven-rung ladders. I have a major stash of such freight car parts, inherited from Richard Hendrickson, so chose some Precision Scale ladders that could be cut to length.

Here they are installed, of course with rungs aligned around the car corner, attached with canopy glue, my preferred adhesive now for detail parts, because of its tenacity.  Stand-offs were added on the side of the ladder away from the end ribs. The ladders may appear abnormally far apart, because of the notch where the new sides meet the old corrugated ends. This was common when originally single-sheathed cars were rebuilt this way.

 I will continue my description of this project in a future post. It’s an interesting car and I look forward to completing it.

 Tony Thompson