A canoe car in HOe

Canoe car #7 straight from the paint shop and ready for a test run

Last winter Dave told me about a special canoe carrying freight car the Ontario Northland operated. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to have something like it for the layout. To get started I looked around the workshop and found a set of trucks I had liberated from an N-scale freight car a long time ago and enough suitable styrene leftovers and scraps for an HOe version.

The overall size and shape were established by playing with the parts and pieces until an idea gelled. The only firm requirement was the car had to accommodate a stack of three canoes, and run on my test track. Once I had the basic shape figured out, I then established some dimensions so I could move onto cutting styrene. The only 'plan' was that scrap of notes to help me remember some key dimensions and component shapes.

I'm not going to go into a detailed, step-by-step how-to, just show some photos of the car after construction, but before painting.

The car is made up of three sub-assemblies: a flat car, two tall bulkheads, and a rack for the canoes.

Dimensions? It's 21' long x 5 3/4' wide. The end bulkheads stand 9' tall from the deck.

The flat car is just a rectangular frame of 0.080" x 0.080" strip styrene, with the top and sides cut from 0.020" sheet styrene. The support structures for the trucks and couplers are built up from scraps of styrene strip stock. One of the reasons I'm not a YouTube presenter is that I don't have a tried-and-true recipe for a lot of the things I do and just muddle through as best I can. I've never built a complete piece of rolling stock of my own design before, so I just winged it, which doesn't make for an authoritative video.

However, if you're looking for some construction guidance I'd recommend reading Freelanced Narrow Gauge Flatcar by legendary modeller Doug Leffler that appeared in the June 1972 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. Although the article doesn't deal specifically with a car like the canoe car, it inspired me to jump in and build because it made the basic structure of a flat car model understandable, so I felt confident I could successfully build one. Because of its concise focus on structure and basic principles I consider the article a classic. It's too bad RMC doesn't collect up articles like this one into some sort of reprint collection. Hmm, it might not sell that well as the collection I have in mind would focus on the basics of construction and other fundamentals instead of the minutiae of detail, airbrushing . . . wait, stop, I see I'm heading for an off-ramp, so let's get back on the highway before it's too late :-)

I forgot to mention that I glued some weights to the bottom of the flat car to give it a bit better tracking. Years ago I bought a strip of self-adhesive 7g weights at George's Trains for just this purpose. I cut one off the strip, then chopped it into 4 pieces, and stuck each to the underside of the flat car's deck. Somewhere in the workshop is a scale, and I need to use it to see how much the finished car weighs.

The couplers on this car are weird. I don't own any Minitrains brand cars, so the couplers on the canoe car are guesswork. No doubt at sometime in the future I'll need to replace them with something else.

On one end I've added a post (a piece of 18 gauge wire) at the coupler position and at the other end ...

... the coupler is a loop of 30 gauge wire, which allows the car to couple to the locomotive.

Those end bulkheads are crazy tall. I can just imagine how much the full size ones would weigh if they were made of steel. The cars would have to be speed limited in corners to prevent them from toppling over. And the aerodynamic drag! Would there be weird vortex threads shed from the bulkheads buffeting the canoes, loosening their tie downs, and tossing them overboard? Maybe I need an HO scale wind tunnel to find out :-)

One important thing that doesn't come across in the photos was how pleasurable this car was to build. It didn't drag on and on as my projects usually do, but was done in three sessions, and each induced mental flow. That's not something that often happens for me these days, so that was a bonus.

Although I like the colour of the Ontario Northland car, I wanted to keep the family feeling in my rolling stock and sprayed it with some Krylon yellow so my canoe car would match the Loonar Module's locomotive. The car needs a few more markings and some light weathering, but for the time being I'm declaring it done.