Great Western Despatch Boxcar
from a Canfield and McGlone Kit
The Kit
John Canfield and Bob McGlone have done a wonderful job in recent years providing historic railroad modellers resin kits of gondolas, boxcars, and other types of pre-1900 rolling stock. This kit was released in the first half of 2014 and it took me several months of lunch-time work sessions--I'm a slow model builder--to build this car. The original kit was for a New York, New Haven and Hartford RR boxcar with a number of extra parts and choice of decals for similar boxcars. I decided to do a little kit bashing to build a Great Western Despatch boxcar as owned by the New York, Lake Erie and Western.
The Prototype
Equipment registers from the 1880s and 90s list a series of 34' (inside length) NYLE&W boxcars for the "Great Western Despatch" fast freight line, numbers 38900-39799. No details on height or width. A photo I purchased from Art Griffin (link on my home page) gives a feirly clear view of the side, but the end is lost in shadow, so no details on fascia design, grabirions, buffer block, etc. This car is similar to other Erie cars in having a double fascia, like the kit. But the ladder made up of grabs is on the side of the car rather than the end.
Construction
The kit includes the usual detailed instructions. The novice modeler will want to follow them closely, but the more experienced--or over-confident modeler like I can be sometimes--can probably build the car without them. Really, it's much like their previous models in largely requiring the builder to add detail parts to a one-piece body and separate underframe.
There can be issues with bubbles and incomplete nut-bolt-weasher castings. This kit did not require any extensive fixes. Since the grabirons needed to be moved to fit the prototype, I scraped all the nbw's off. This left little dimples, but they are hard to see on the ends of the car. There was a vertical irregularity in one end roughly where the ladder of grabs would have been, so I smoothed things off and rescribed the boards. This would not have shown at all if an actual ladder were to be mounted on the ends, but that was not an option here.
The roofwalk castings looked too thick so I replaced them with new roofwalks made from an appropriate thickness of styrene. The photo of the unpainted car shows details such as door hardware and grabirons on the roof. I added nut-bolt-washer castings on the ends in line with the four truss rods using the jig in the photo.
I use jigs for grabiron placement a lot, having built up a stack for different spacing and arrangement of grabirons. As an aside, it seems to me that many railroads pre-1900 followed their own standard for safety equipment placement from series to series, so the modeler can extrapolate from one car to another in lieu of actual photos. Perhaps this does not hold true so much for special series of cars like the one modeled here. Of course, after 1900 the railroads all started working to the same standard.
I airbrushed the car Scalecoat Boxcar Red and added the Art Griffin decals, which, by the way, are very easy to work with.
Kitbashing Potential
Resin kits are difficult to modify and so most have a limited potential for kitbashing to fit a particular prototype. On the other hand, this kit builds into a generic-looking boxcar and the creators of the kit list several prototypes that the kit matches fairly well. Dimensions are typical of larger 34ft boxcars of the 1880s to 1890s.
Summary
This kit builds into a nice-looking model. A nice feature is that except for paint and glue, absolutely everything needed to built a boxcar is provided, including trucks and couplers.
Kit Availability
In short, it's not. However, McGlone and Canfield release a new limited-run kit every few months. They advertise new kits on the EarlyRail Yahoo group forum and they are usually spoken for within a very few days, so you have to be alert.