New Gons & Loads

Greetings All,

A six car joint NYCTL / APRR Patti O Paint Shop Project is in the books giving each railroad three new 50' gons with a variety of loads.

1:1 Sir Neal sent down five Athearn Blue Box 50' gondolas to be stripped, painted and lettered two for the APRR and one for the EBRR. I added a Lima gon I had on my roster to the project so that each layout would end up with three similar cars for virtual ops use.

The five BB gons have been disassembled and their parts sorted and separated. Note that Sir Neal sent the gons down with Kadee whisker couplers and P-2000 metal wheels which were a huge plus for this project. The underframes, weights and trucks will be sprayed flat black with a rattle can and the wheel faces brush painted flat black.

Old plastic wheels in the trucks keep the axle holes clean. This old tile works great as the wheels don't roll over the ridges when being sprayed.

APRR 8279, a Lima product from my roster, is the only non Athearn BB product in this project and will stay on the NYCTL. 

APRR 8294, an Athearn BB gon, is ready for it's next PCCM load.

EBRR 5283, also an Athearn BB gon, is also ready for it's next PCCM load. The gons will spend half their time empty so I weathered the insides with some rattle can spray paints that included Dupli-Color red primer purchased at local auto parts store.

Both the APRR and EBRR will get a set of three gons that will run as a block. Loads will originate at Gervais Pipe in the background and be shipped to various APRR consignees.

The new gons come around the west side curve. Blog reader Jade Fog had suggested weathering the inside of the car in a prior gon post. I took the advice and like the way these cars have turned out.

On to the Loads!

When discussing the project with 1:1 Sir Neal it was decided that the gons would carry pipe loads from Gervais Pipe on the NYCTL to Shapeless Steel, Cargill and Tropicana on the APRR in separate moves and return empty to Gervais Pipe after delivering their loads to one of the aforementioned industries.

Looking to make pipe loads that would look good in the car and also give the impression that they are suitable for food service I bought three packages of small dowels from a craft store. 

Using Elmer's Glue and some toothpicks as spacers I glued a row of dowels to a piece of cardstock and weighed it down as it dried. Next I glued two tooth pick pieces across the dowels and the another row of dowels on top repeating the procedure for a total of four rows of pipe per load. Two hobby stick pieces were added to the bottom for additional height.

Each gon can carry two pipe loads. Here are six of the loads getting ready for a PCCM shipment from Gervais Pipe & Fitting in Empire City NY. The loads were painted rattle can aluminum and wrapped with Chart Pak tape. 

Here's how the three project gons would look fully loaded at Terminal Yard ready for shipment to the APRR's Rock Ridge Yard. For the record each pipe load consists of 4 rows of 11 pipes for a total of 44 pipes.

With the pipe loads complete I wanted to surprise Sir Neal with some nice scrap loads and came across these cast resin loads on ebay offered by seller danpik.

Here they are painted with rattle can red primer and oversprayed with flat black.

The scrap loads are loaded! I left them with the rusty look so they would stand out in the black gons.

Of course this project has led to me revisiting my own gondola fleet. I'll cover that in a future post.

We'll be starting a four layout PCCM 64 virtual op this weekend. Look for these cars to make their PCCM debut

next week in the inbound portion.

Thanks for reading!!!
See ya soon!!!