I've needed to complete lumber loads for my sizable fleet of centerbeams. I want to have something more realistic than the commercial offerings so I came up with an approach using balsa wood strips (1/4 X 3/16") where I scribed the end of lumber bundles into the wood so I could have paper wraps appear to go between the bundles. It looked pretty good with just enough irregularity to look like the prototype. I glued a magnet at the back to keep them attached on the car although that turned out to be unecessary. I print out my own paper wraps for Canadian mills using files from Chris Vanderheide's great Algoma Central layout website:
https://vanderheide.ca/blog/lumber-loads/.
The problem was that the wood is relatively expensive and takes quite a bit of time to put it all together. I wanted to streamline the process so I came up with a 3D printed block with the scribed lines in to assist placing the paper wrappers and to hold the magnet in a consistent location. I made three variants with different combinations of lumber lengths so there will be variations between cars.
I printed some out today and I'm happy with how they turned out. I'll make up a bunch to take traveling next month to keep me busy when I'm cooling my heels waiting on the weather. Hopefully I'll soon have a properly loaded lumber fleet!
Here is one of my original loads made from wood strips to compare. The new 3D block fits both Rapido and Red Caboose cars.
There are scribe lines on the front, sides and top.
The magnet indent on the back. Each block takes about 20 g of resin including supports. They are hollowed out a bit.
