Cement car rebuilds.

[e-paw]

My mid 40's freelanced line handles two main commodities. The backbone of the company is hard coal, followed in a close second by cement. After the attack on Pearl Harbor the U.S. railroads were asked to move more freight and people than at any point in history in order to defeat the Axis powers. When Uncle Sam needed cement shipments to increase 10 fold, the railroads did what they had to to keep supplies moving. For rail lines coming out of the great depression this was no easy task. The SH&D car shops answered the call by pulling older equipment from the dead line in Bergen point and rebuilding them. This meant using cars that were not ideally suited for the job due to the labor intensive loading/unloading design of the cars, but in time of crises they got the job done.
To represent this I modified a group of old Athearn pickle cars and an ice refer. As I was applying the decals I thought that the cars needed a little something more to back date them a little. Adding fish belly center sills would do the trick so out came the styrene and I went to work.

    Here is a shot of the cars to be modified, I figure the pickle cars could have started life as covered gondolas and the reefer could have the ice bunkers removed and dams added to the inside of the doorways to allow for the loading of bulk cement not unlike the l&NE did to some of It's box cars. All of the cars will get hopper doors added to the under frames also, but for now I working on the center sills.



    The were cut from simple styrene, lucky all the under frames are the same so I only had to measure once and cut seven sets.




    they were glued in place after I cut some groves in the brake gear so that they would lay flat. I was not to worried about detail on the sills because the hopper doors will cover parts of them.