Once upon a time, I modeled the only railroad I knew, the Southern Pacific. I saw it all over the Los Angeles area, mostly out near City of Industry and a few times per year out in Tehachapi Pass. Not counting the branchline traffic I saw daily, I'd drive to Industry Yard and park at the east end and just watch until it got too dark; sometimes with a friend, other times alone. It was in these formative years that I made a lot of impractical decisions as of what to model. Being members of various clubs (not all at once mind you) all over the area, I stayed until each club either folded or the politics got too much to bear; you take your pick. As a result of big club layouts, I did gravitate towards long SP style trains. Lots of long manifests, lumber, PFE reefer blocks, cement, sugar beets, and or course an SP ore train.
Now that I'm building, well rebuilding actually, my Arizona Southern, freight cars are, shall we say, plentiful. In fact there are some remaining that might be totally useless as I'm not certain sugar beets and southeast Arizona would go together very well; I'm not sure those cars would work for any other commodity. Everything else works however, and even those 100 ton high side ore cars will be repurposed to haul copper ore from the mine to the concentrator and smelter complex. I was going to acquire those two bay open 100 ton hoppers SP had so many of, but they are ridiculously expensive on the second hand market and frankly they are not worth what folks are asking for them, at least in my eyes. I looked into a few other choices, side dumps and those square Gunderson aggregate hoppers, but again, who needs another big expense when I have a load of the high side ore cars on hand; not to mention some of the "Great Lakes" style cars also with extensions for use on one remote branchline. The drop bottom ore cars are mostly swap meet finds and stuff found on sale over many years, they are all in various stages of completion, none really being ready for prime time though. Here are three.
The bulk of the cars will be of the tight bottom design, basically repurposed SP cars which are now surplus. No longer belonging to any club, running long trains will be a thing of the past. Besides, the only joy of those long trains was blocking all the sidings and crawling along at scale speeds while the "hot rodders" were trying to burn up the rails, turning their trains into elongated slot cars. Most of the modeled Arizona Southern will be within yard limit territory, and maximum speeds will be between 10 mph and 15 mph; only the RDC ever exceeds that speed and never in town or within yard limits.
Quite a few of the old Roundhouse high side ore car kits got assembled many moons ago. A big stumbling block occurred when adding InterMountain wheels to the supplied trucks, the new better wheels rubbed on the supplied metal weight when at the proper height for KD #5's. Several fixes were investigated and what I wound up doing was removing the stock weights, and adding thin sheet lead inside the cars, gluing the same to the floors. This worked out very well and even allowed the cars to remain "happy" while running with my other freight cars while empty. Here are a couple of that style of car in progress. I still need to get the new decals printed up.
...and here is a car showing the lead added to the floor.
Not being certain if you can just buy lead sheet any longer, as now all wheel weights are seemingly cast iron, I suppose one could either use the thinner iron wheel weights or some other shaped metal weight, the only issue is cutting the harder metals at home. The lead sheet we used was cut out on an old paper cutter with relative ease.
Trying to keep costs as low as possible, I figure that repurposing these ore cars is our best bet. That and they look pretty cool behind a couple of big Alco Centuries, rolling past all the cacti.
That's all for now, comment if the mood strikes you.
