This past December, Patrick Tillery stopped by to see the railroad. He was in town to visit family and we had a nice chat about coal haulers, the Short Line, and railroad modeling in general. Patrick is a close friend of Stuart Thayer, one of the founding members of the CWE operating group, and Stuart helped arrange the visit. Patrick is also a very fine modeler and you can see some of his work here on the Appalachian Railroad Modeling website: https://appalachianrailroadmodeling.com/models/ln-models/.
Fast forward to last week and a package arrives in the mail. In the box is a fully assembled Tichy pulpwood flat. It even has the plate for the ACI label and the plates on the bulkheads for the end reporting marks. All of the features that you would expect to find on one of the CWE pulpwood flats are included as you can see in the photo below.
The car is Patrick's work and it is beautifully done. Next up is decals and weathering, and then it's on to work on the railroad.
Thanks again for the nice gift, Patrick.
Back in November of 2013, I posted about a renewed effort to get more hopper cars on the railroad. You can view the post here: https://cwerailroad.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-renewed-effort.html. As I've commented before, coal hauling railroads just seem to eat coal cars. There are never enough and you can always use more than you have. Combine this with the fact that each one must be painted, lettered and weathered before entering service and it's enough to make one abandoned the proto-freelance concept for some railroad with a plentiful supply of RTR cars.
Then in February of 2014, I made a post about the 99th and 100th hopper cars that were added to the fleet. You can see that post here: https://cwerailroad.blogspot.com/2014/02/nos-99-and-100.html. Since then, another 50 cars have been added to the roster. The photo below shows numbers 149 and 150.
This total doesn't include the eight Train Miniature cars or the two Athearn quad hoppers that were retired during this period. It also doesn't include the 10 Ortner cars that have been painted and lettered for the home road or the 18 DEEX cars that were weathered and placed in service.
It often seems to me like I'm not making much progress towards adding rolling stock to the railroad. Perhaps it's because most of what has been built has gotten lost in the never ending sea of hopper cars...
