Fans of the Maine two-footers and Bridgton & Saco River know that the Bridgeton road had two tank cars; the tanks were provided by and owned by the Standard Oil Company of New York; the railroad provided regular flat cars to haul them around. My railroad will be "inspired by" the B&SR, although not concours-accurate. I will probably have more than two tank cars, but here's the start: (Apologies for the fuzzy pic, the macro on this camera is still giving me fits.) On the right is one of the tank cars from Shapeways. The first thing wrong with it was the material: the "WSF" has a fuzzy texture. It's not that offensive for surfaces that are supposed to be wood, but for metal, it looks like a terminal case of rust texture. Several iterations of fill/paint/sand makes it acceptable, but it's an awful lot of work. The second problem was the height above the railhead ... it was almost 2 feet too high. I cut away most of the frame, kept the needle beams, but made new bolsters to get the height so that the deck is about 24" above the railhead. On the left is a flat scratchbuilt from styrene. The tank is from an N scale Roundhouse 50' Modern Tank car, with the bolsters and all of the other detail whittled off. The dome was "borrowed" from a cheap 3-dome N scale tank car of undetermined origin. There are two more domes there so I can repeat this twice. And for a Fantasy Car: Yes, it's a steel frame. Reading up on the B&SR, one of the flats that was used to haul around the SOCONY tanks was "worn out" by the load. So in my fantasy world, a steel frame car makes perfect sense. The car is one of the Roundhouse broadgauge 30' flats, narrowed to 6'-6" width and lowered so the deck is about 24" above the railhead. The tank is piece of 1/2" copper water pipe, a scale 26' long. The ends are laminations of .040 styrene turned to roughly semi hemispherical shape; the dome is simply a piece of 3/8" styrene. I have not yet made the top for the dome yet. I like this one. The only problem is it is H-E-A-V-Y. Put two or three of these in a train and my little Forney won't be able to pull much more. (The mogul, of course, will haul a whole train of these and not even break a sweat) Even if I put the plastic tank on it, it's still heavy. Stay tuned.... Respectfully, Bob S
I like the looks of your black tank car. Years ago, Train & Trooper had two different B&SR tank car kits. Although they long ago closed their doors, a couple of years ago I was able to track down the owner and he still had a few! I just need to get around to assembling them...
I don't know if he still has any, but if you are ever interested, or come upon someone, I can dig up his email.
Crusader Rail Services still has a few T&T items floating around and if not, they might be able to put you in touch with the T&T owner.
I have Matt's info around here somewhere. Ray K (Crusader Rail) bought much of the T&T inventory, but not quite all of it. Matt kept some items, including the tank cars. So if any remain, folks will need to contact him directly.
