Tionesta Valley Cabboose #111
From my gondola and flat car building project, I had one more frame and deck made up so I decided to make up a caboose to go with the flat cars. I found a set of Ted Stinson drawings and started building it up. I have an extreme amount of balsa wood from my RC plane hobby as through the years as older enthusiasts have passed, ive ended up with their balsa collections. I easily have over $2000 in balsa if you went to purchase it new today and it’s probably more like $3-5000 retail so I am trying to use it to build things for the RR and this particular set of plans calls for the primary wood as balsa. Along with all the balsa I’ve collected, there’s been plenty of other dimensional woods like bass, popular, teak, and cedar as some guys also built model boats. In one box, there were lots of hard wood strips for planking and scribed wood for decking so while it’s not quite as wide as called for, I used the decking for the outside walls of the caboose. This is how much I’ve gotten done so far and will be making up the railings and ladders out of soldered brass. I also intend to have the side door slide in brass 3/16” channel imbedded into the deck and fastened inside the top edge of the door opening. I realize that the truss rod layout isn’t the same but that’s ok. More to come.