In addition to the above structure build, I've been working on a scratchbuild project for a Southern Railway 50' boxcar. The prototype of the one I'm modelling started life as a 40' Central of Georgia built boxcar that the Southern rebuilt in the 1970's into a 50' car.
As an experiment, I decided to see if the same concept of cardstock structures could be applied to rolling stock. As such, I built a shell out of artists mount board around a balsa wood base, using dimensions taken from the Southern Railway's own car diagrams from a fleet document compiled in 1982.
Converting the measurements down to 1:48 scale, I set about using Photoshop to convert photographs of the real boxcar into printed "skins" for the car. As the layout design means that the car will only ever be viewed from one side at any one time, I used photographs from two different boxcars from the same fleet, so I essentially get two cars for the price of one.
To create the skin for the roof, I took photographs of HO scale cars of the same type, and used those in Photoshop exactly how I did the sides. The car ends were done in the same manner.
For now, the car is just a box with texture papers glued to it, however I fully intend to build up the raised sections - doors, runners, grab rails, ladders, etc, with layers of cardstock, styrene, and wire to get a fully realised model. As such, please do bear in mind that this is a very WIP model - no where near finished.
