Freight Car Friday

Many thanks to Chris van der Heide's excellent Algoma Central in HO Scale blog for the idea of Freight Car Friday. I am happy to 'borrow' this idea and I owe a debt of gratitude to all of the bloggers who have inspired and taught me in the past two years. It's because of the knowledge that the online modeling community has shared with me on the web and the debt to them that I started QGRY in HO Scale.

So without further ado, this inaugural Freight Car Friday's car is...

The 50' Newsprint Boxcar 

I took this shot of QGRY 75017 at the Port of Quebec City in October 2013. According to http://freight.railfan.ca this car was built by National Steel Car in Hamilton, ON in 1979. This looks to be a repainted CP Action Green car with the 1970's black-and-white multimark painted out.

According to the article on Newsprint Boxcars by John Riddell in the June 2002 Model Railroader (pg 70) These CP cars started out as being originally built for the Minnesota, Dakota and Western and had the reporting marks "MDW" before they were acquired by CP in 1988. I have not been able to confirm the history of this but I am sure that this car has seen years of service and as the consumption of paper decreases and more and more Paper Mills close, these cars will be seen less and less.

Happily, HO models similar to these cars exist and the first ever weathering project I attempted was to take a shiny new CP car and turn it into a QGRY rustbucket. Modeling a Paper Mill ensures that these cars will live on on my layout.