Page 28 - November December 2016

Old Freight Cars never die ....!
(.......they just lose their wheels)
Peter Tobutt
Not quite sure what the chap is doing with that hammer but, hey, he must know, surely? But back to those un- saleable ore hoppers, whatever became of them?
One was lucky, it ended up on the RIP track.
Sooner or later we all find we have the odd freight car surplus to requirements. It may be the wrong period, over-weathered, badly lettered, damaged or just plain boring! What do we do with them? Try selling the best on E-bay? My experience of trying to sell scratch-built cars is that they fetch very low prices that don’t even cover the value of the recoverable parts such as trucks, couplers and hand brake wheels. An example is this ore hopper listed for £4.99 plus postage which resulted in 39 views, 2 watchers but no bids.
No. 3173
So why not keep them all and give them a second life on the layout as a special type of scenery? The first stop is the RIP track (= Repair In Place). Most big depots/junctions had a siding or two reserved for this function to undertake small maintenance jobs on freight cars to keep ‘em running until they were booked into the backshops for major repairs. On my railroad, the careful management have a policy of fencing-off the underside of cars on the RIP tracks with close- boarding to prevent train-spotting kids or even hobos from crawling underneath them.
This gives me the perfect excuse to remove the trucks as well as the couplers and even the brake wheel.
Scrape the paint off a few boards and re-varnish as new planks, place a couple of spare planks ready for fitting and add a working platform together with RIP team members and your old car is ready to fit onto your layout.
The others were so badly damaged in a “derailment” that the management decided repairs were uneconomical and so they were just left to rust away in the desert near the mine.
Similar work can be done on that old hopper car you no longer need. Weld on a few repair plates, add a guy with a sledge hammer and after skirting it out, you have another trackside ornament.
Yes, this is No. 3173 in its final form!
So don’t throw away those old freight cars, “repurpose” them.
28 ROUNDHOUSE December 2016