Back in a post in July I mentioned that recent reading had showed me that

… I did not know clearly how the movement of stock in the area worked. I was thinking it was more about locally raised stock going to market, but actually the largest portion of the business was stock being moved up from Texas to feed in the Flint Hills, and then after fattening up the cattle they went to market in likely Kansas City. Big blocks of cars would move loaded and unloaded, certainly my Orient should be in on this business, so I need to make some more matching cars. A project I’ll get slowly working on.

And I have been working slowly on this, in several directions. I have now doubled my fleet of Orient stock cars (from 4 to 8), and I’ve worked over some older models.

One thing I had to confront was the issue of Scale-Craft stock car roofs. These models use a unique roof stock that has a low and thin profile. The result is that the edges can chip off, and many built the cars very plain so they don’t look good either. In particular, the ATSF stock cars seen in this article, cars I wanted to run, the roofs needed attention. One was a very loose fit (noticeably too small — it was moved to a car that it would fit better) and the other I made from Eastern roof stock and the pitch did not ever look correct.

The idea for the solution came from a model built by Pierre Bourassa. He used thin (but not thin enough) plastic sheet to cover the roof, no ribs added. My idea was to use .010 sheet styrene and then add styrene strips for ribs.

I should also mention, making roofs is my least favorite car building job. The good news being this process really was in the quick/easy category. Keeping with a vintage look, I used S-C roof walk stock and reproduction Eastern castings for the end walks.

I mentioned that the original wood roof stock edges can chip off. By using the plastic you can cover the chips completely, the look is much improved.

Overall I’m really pleased with the updated look! A project worth doing to improve the stock car fleet.