For today the topic is three OO scale cement hoppers, ready for painting. It is an interesting trio. The mostly brass car is Schorr. It was constructed from remnants of another OO gauger’s project. What he did was convert two Schorr brass 2 bay cement hoppers into three bay cars. As he used 2/5 of the middle of each car, this left me two 2/5 car ends and two 1/5 car ends. Looking at the parts I thought I could splice the bigger ends together and I could! That car came out fine and will blend in a train easily. As always click on the photo for a better view.

The three bay car in the front is Picard. This car came to me in a group of things, started but not completed, never had ends applied or mounts for trucks. It occurred to me that I could use parts of the 1/5 Schorr ends and make a pretty prototypical model. Vintage wood shapes from the parts supply worked perfectly on this model. It has a vintage look still but will I think be pretty successful when painted and lettered, will be one of the best examples of this car ever built up!

That leaves one more car. I think the story on this Picard hopper is that it was completely built up as an open hopper (what their two bay body was meant to be) but then someone had an idea and put roof stock on it and was working on making it into a covered hopper — but abandoned the project. I added the hoppers and all of the details, including Schorr hatches from the parts above and the end parts of Schorr roof walks. The main roof walk is HO from probably a boxcar. The car is surprisingly effective, I am very interested to see it with the paint and decals in a string of cement hoppers on the layout.

All three took more time than I thought they would but they were fun projects and I look forward to finishing them up later this summer.