CPR Communications Car 411513 - or Darwin makes a railcar...

[Puddington]

The duckbilled platypus...... the ultimate Darwin supporters revenge they say.... well I think I found the model railway version of that..... the Canadian Pacific's Communications car...

http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/cp/cp411513jpa.jpg

http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/cp/cp411513jpb.jpg

Ok; so........if you are the CPR in the 1950's and you need a car for CPR telegraph employees to hang out in a check regional lines along the right of way you do the following.....

1. Take a vintage 1910 wooden side 65' passenger coach....
2. Remove it's original roof, add a turtle roof....
3. Cut some doors in... it was a coach, not a combine......
4. Remove a bunch of windows......
5. Add smoke jacks for stoves, add a few port holes for cables and, oh ya....
6. Add a cupola for light, cause you killed the gas lighting when you rebuilt the roof......

Nothing to it folks....

Except if you want to model it...then you got issues....

I, being "nuts" about this piece of railway weirdness gave it a go.... I posted some beginning shots a few months ago.... for those that missed the "recipe" here's the bill of goods......

1. Athearn wooden side 58' passenger coach.... (take frame; walls to cut windows from; trucks and trusses)
2. Bachmann "shorty" steel side coach ...(take ends and sand the $##! out of them and doors- and you need two sets as you have to "weld" a full door from two Bachmann doors...)
3. Kaslo CPR caboose kit...(use a CPR cupola - the actual one in the picture isn't what I modeld because it was just impossible for me to build sides... Hey, I'm not Marty !)
4. Evergreen scribed sheet styrene....(walls and floors - you have to extend the frame to 65 feet...
5. Balsa wood to carve a turtle roof out of......
6. Micro Trains lo pro wheels and couplers...
7. The near impossible to find CDS CPR MOW dry transfer set.....
8. Assorted detail parts ( markers, interior stuff...), strip styrene and anything else you can find.....

Put it in a blender and...............










It's not exact.....but I'm not losing sleep over that....

The car is the right scale length but the windows are too big so I had to selectively compress the car - I couldn't find skinny enough windows so we comprimise....... The cupola isn't the same, albiet it is a prototypical CPR cupola, the smaller one in the pictures turned out to be too hard for me to build.....

The ends are "close enough" for me and the missing three pane upper windows above the main windows are impossible for me to duplicate.... But I think it certainly captures the spirit of the prototype.... and besides, it's so obscure a car that I don't know how many people will have ever seen anything to compare it to....

The pictures are not doing the roof justice... the grain of the balsa isn't as obvious as in the pictures and the roof's flat tint doesn't show up well do to the lighting, the camera also makes more of the side imperfections than the human eye sees so I'll live with it.....

This car was used by CPR Telegraph and Communication crews to inspect rural branchline telegraph lines - it usually trailed a wayfreight and repaired lines that were damaged and down.. ( As an aside, one ex CPR employee I spoke with said this was universally hated car assignment for wayfreight crews because they could turn a 4 hour trip into a 14 hour adventure as they had to stop and wait for the Telegraph crew to do it's thing.....) The car looks neat trailing a small local and "working the lines".....

This is my most complex and difficult scratchbuild to date and all in all, I'm not unhappy with it's outcome; I have learned a few things creating "Darwin's MOW car".....

[wm3798]

It looks like it took a lot of lemons, but you've got a tall glass of lemonade there!

Lee

[Bob Bufkin]

Your work on passenger equipmetn astounds me.  I can't glue two corners into a perfect 45 degree angle.

That car looks like an old drover's caboose.  I know UP, ATSF and others used them.  Did CP and/or CN have drover's?

[Puddington]

Not that I know but with those two systems, anything is possible. The PGE had a few; Marty Coil, "Master Hackman" has modeled one for me......



My first thought when I saw the pictures of the Communication car was just that; "drover"... then I assumed it had been a combine but both assumptions were wrong. The good people at the CPSIG web site put me on the right track with some information about the car (it had a close cousin that was a hospital car in WW1 that looked like it) and identified the car's original origins. Jeff Pinchbeck from the CPSIG gave me more insite; specifically that the loading door was added, as this had been a first class coach and that the Pincsh gas lighting which the car had originally had was lost when the canvas covered clostry roof was replaced with the turtle shell roof. The addition of the cupola is for no other reason than to add a source of light. ( No one knows if there was a way up, there were not seats but one fellow suggested a ladder or canvas swing chair might have been rigged by crews.)

Regardless; one very interesting car..........

[up1950s]

I love unique stuff like that , swell car and well done .

[jmlaboda - RIP]

"That car looks like an old drover's caboose.  I know UP, ATSF and others used them.  Did CP and/or CN have drover's?"

Actually it looks more like a caboose that has an express section, likely for use on a branch that has little or no passenger service.  Many railroads had those, large and small, and they simply had a set of baggage doors placed somewhere on the side so that package pick-up and delivery could be done.  Drover cabooses typically had at least a small set of coach like windows in a row for the drovers to have a view.