My brother has several of these as shorty cars with plastic logs. I decided to kitbash one up to see about extending them to “more or less” scale 40 footers. we are blessed with a bunch of white oaks which spend most of their days dropping leaves and limbs on the railroad, so I thought I’d get a little payback as well.
A piece of white pine 1x4 was bandsawed to make a center beam whose outside dimensions match the plastic center beam. The car was sawed in half and the pine center beam notched back about an inch to allow it to insert into the plastic center beam of each end section. The pine beam was scribed to match the beam divisions on the original ends and then glued into each end with medium thick CA. The new beam extended the car length by 6 1/2 inches to roughly match Seattle Car and Foundry skeleton cars.
I picked up some fallen branches off the railroad and cut them to 16 inch lengths, trimmed off all the extraneous twigs and cleaned them up a little. Currently the logs are tied on with twine pending a trip to Ace hardware for some small chain.
They came out looking good enough to extend the rest of the cars in the roster.
John
