Masonite Corporation Thrall All Door Boxcar

Greetings All,

I was recently looking for decals on the Highball Graphics website for another paint project and noted set #F-338; 

which caught my eye as I have two Thrall All Door boxcar shells ready for painting courtesy of fellow modeler and blogger John Bruce who sent them my way awhile ago.

The project took on more steam once I found that the Highball Graphics decal set did accurately model the car in this photo. 

What's Masonite? A patented process of steam cooking wood fibers under pressure to make wood products.  

Why an All Door Boxcar? The all door concept was designed to simplify the loading of dimensional cargo, mainly lumber, offering the ease of loading a flat car with the protection of a boxcar. The Thrall company built their first all door boxcars in 1967. The original cars had some issues with the door stops that were quickly rectified. The cars seem to have fallen out of favor by the mid 1970's however with the advent of shrink wrapping and the 72' centerbeam cars.

Life Like, Bachmann and AHM have all offered HO scale all door boxcar models. The Life Like models are the shells I'm working with for this project. They were originally released in 1975 and came with a multi piece shell that had separate end pieces. Life Like later simplified production with a single piece shell. 

When I undertook the decal project I knew it would be a lot of cutting and was unsure how well it would work out so I only ordered one set of decals but I did paint both shells for the project. Both are the original type shell with the separate ends and could be over 40 years old!

The cars are painted and ready for the decal process.

The Highball Graphics decal sheet comes with this handy lettering guide. There are a lot of rivets, edges, handles etc to decal in between and over! The LRLX reporting marks belong to General Electric Rail Services Corporation. They leased more than one type of car to the Masonite Corporation as noted in this photo.

The first side is completed. The ACI label is not included in the Highball Graphics set. Both Highball and Microscale offer sets of them. So far so good! 

After completing the second side with good results I reached out to John B. who furnished the shells and offered it to him. I was happy he accepted the offer. Here's that car just out of the shop and getting ready to head out of Terminal Yard towards California. 

A pair of U boats have coupled on and this All Door boxcar is on it's way to John B's Los Feliz & North Western layout. John possesses a tremendous amount of railroading knowledge and he informed me that the Masonite Corp was a major shipper on the Northwestern Pacific that would work perfectly for sending the car east in our virtual ops. 

After a circuitous route of the United States the Masonite shell finally arrived safe and sound on John B's L.F.&N.W. layout.

   
In the meantime I ordered, received and applied the decals to the second car. Here's that car ready for service. 

A few weeks later the Masonite car was spotted being unloaded at Neal's Lumber & Hardware in Empire City NY so look for it in a future P.C.C.M.

Thanks for reading!