Rail car construction

[Cary Stewart]

Here are three more suggestions to contact for info on car restoration. California State RR Museum in Sacramento, CA, Nevada State RR Museum in Carson City, NV and the Colorado RR Museum in Golden, CO. The NSRM is currently restoring the heavy duty flat car used to transport the Carson & Colorado NG locos from Mound House to the Carson Shops. All three of these museums have done both NG and Standard gage cars of all types. There are other museums and individuals that have either restored or built from scratch wooden cars in 12" to the FT scale. The Euricka(spelling) NG 4-4-0 has a new passenger car built from the ground up to pull around on its travels.
Cary

[Glenn Brooks]

Thanks,guys. I’ll pass along your suggestions. Today I did raise concerns about diagonal truss members not being pinned or mortised into the vertical frames. Hopefully the PM will take note of that and have those secured prior to external sheathing covering everything up.

I think basically the problem is this cAr has been undergoing restoration for some 10 years now , and the crew who measured and inspected the original construction is long gone. So any notion of the original wood working methods is long forgotten. On the plus side, The car is all new wood construction, so at least we’re not dealing with dry rot and termite damaged frame members. Mainly, with a lot of the detail from the original 1900 construction lost over time, the carpenter hired to do the work is not familiar with what I think of as proper ship building methods- e.g. frames and beams all tightly fitted and thru bolted. Glued where appropriate. So weve got loose cut joints - rough carpenter style, with up to 1/4” gaps in some of the joints, rather than fitting close tolerances everywhere. Why no one was looking at this, I don’t know. But, it is what it is.

There is some talk of next rebuilding one of the original 1885 parlor coaches. We have part of the original Skelton still surviving. So maybe lessons learned with this existing coach can be applied to the next one.

Glenn

[Adirondack]

Here's another useful publication:

https://books.google.com/books?id=pFD2N ... milarbooks

Google Books is like mecca when it comes to these old and forgotten publications.

Chris