Building A Wooden Freight Car

The Program

By: Grant Knowles

As a narrow gauge modeller I often find myself assembling rolling stock kits for my railroad as there is very limited RTR cars pertaining to my specific railroad in HOn3 (fortunately I also enjoy building rolling stock). The nature of these kits vary from injection molded styrene to some really nice laser cut wooden models. Recently I found myself assembling a Labelle HOn3 wooden car kit https://www.labellemodels.com/, which technology-wise, is much like the Campbell structure kits – old technology but are a lot of fun to build and make a very respectable model – even by today’s standards.

This got me thinking, what sort of wooden rolling stock kits exist in HO standard gauge considering the recent evolution (revolution) to foreign-made ready-to-run plastic cars? As with structures the introduction of laser cut kits has been taking place but in this case, at a very low level and largely focused on the smaller market niches such as narrow gauge. There really isn’t anything in the standard gauge realm. Once again the general trend of the hobby has been to the instant gratification of highly detailed mass produced RTR plastic models.

Fortunately you can still find wooden RR kits on the market though the technology is more from the last century. That is actually a blessing in disguise as it aligns well with what we’re embarking upon. Wouldn’t it be fun and educational to build one of these older style kits?

The following pages describes the process, steps, tips and tricks to building a Building a Wooden Railroad Car Kit.
The format we’ll be following is based on what has worked well in the past – clinics on key topics delivered at the meets over the course of the project interspersed with work session at our KitBusters meets.

Relevant information pertaining to the project can be found in these pages including presentations, photos and web links.

The vendor products that we will be working with (and making reference to) include:

of which Juneco & Taylor specialize in Canadian prototypes.

Each manufacturer follows the same architecture for their kits so all will make great candidates for this project. All the kits come with manufactures instructions, some are very good, others gloss over key topics so we’ll keep a close eye on this and will augment where necessary.

Though kits are well engineered and made with the best of materials, we may discover there is room for improvements by upgrading parts or even adding more parts to improve the realism of the finished car. We’ll be looking for these opportunities during the course of the project.

Some of our key objectives of this program are to:

  • learn new building and construction techniques;
  • learn from each other; and
  • build up your confidence (to tackle more challenging projects).

The process we will follow is rather straightforward – a series of clinics followed by KitBuster workshops where we get to practice what we have learned. Don’t worry, the clinicians will be at the workshops to help us along.

We look forward to your participation.