Christmas Vacation Kaolin Boxcar

Several different railroads rostered at least a few boxcars for hauling kaolin to paper mills and whatnot. I saw a model in an old thread on the Model Railroad Hobbyist forums and decided that the KY&N ought to have a few of these. I started with an Athearn 40' Steel Refrigerator car. I shaved off the door detail and left side grab irons and modified a pair of 6' Youngstown steel doors to fit the shorter height of the car body. New door tracks were scratchbuild from strip styrene and glued to the body of the car. The left side grabs were replaced with left over A-Line grabs.

For the roof, I removed the old roof walk, hatches and cast on hatch hinges and details and installed a modified Plano etched roof walk. I also added strip styrene to the roof to serve the dual purpose of added ribs to the roof and to hide holes from the trimmed off reefer hinges. I still need to add another row of ribs to the opposite side of the new hatches to hide the other holes from trimmed off hatch hardware.

The weight was removed from the underframe and will be attached to the inside of the car, a slight trim was made to the underframe that allowed the body to ride lower on the trucks.

These cars were rebuilt in-house in 1964 and 1965, so the roof walks remained on the cars until they were scrapped in 1979. Most of these cars were painted in the KY&N Hunter Green and Yellow scheme that debuted in 1964, so this car will get a coat of green whenever the cold weather lets up.