John - Thought you might enjoy this video down at the bottom of this email. It was done a couple months ago on the layout of a friend, Rod Case, in Windsor, Ontario. We have done a lot of work together over the years and he models in N scale as do I. Rod models everything Canadian Pacific (He is a former CP employee) . The result is a layout where my Alaska Railroad and CR&NW equipment all feel right at home particularly in a couple scenes in the video where there is a station with an octagonal, enclosed water tank identical to the ones used on ARR (ARR copied the CP design).

As you might expect, all of my equipment requires some work to turn it into ARR equipment; nothing is straight out of the box. I think you will recognize this pattern from your own experience building an Alaska Railroad layout. In this video, the engine is a Bachmann 4-6-0 on which I changed out the tender that comes with the model and installed a smaller, more appropriate tender, added a sound system and then painting and lettering. It is reasonably similar to the 4-6-0s that CR&NW had (#51 and #52 – I may change the number on mine at some time but I’m not in a hurry to do so right now) but in N scale steam locomotives, you often have to go with “close enough” to make it work and still be enjoyable. I have a couple 2-6-0s which are almost identical in every respect to CR&NW 101, 102 and 103. I’ll settle for these two types of locomotives for now. They are both incredibly good runners, as you can tell from the way the 4-6-0 performs in the video. It did just fine handling an nine car train up the hill and through the spiral tunnels on the CP main line.

As far as the cars-

1. The first car is an ARR 801-850 series boxcar made from and Athearn 36’ wooden truss rod box car. I replaced the truss rods with a steel center beam, added an end door, painted and lettered the car. I have done this with about ten cars, so I have enough to operate a fair amount of railroading.

2. The second car is a ARR 1201-1220 series USRA design box car from Micro-Trains that only required painting and lettering to get it ready to operate. I have four of these at this time and need to make a few more of this car and the ARR 860 series boxes which were very similar.

3. The third car is an ARR 8550-8599 series boxcar that is from Micro-Trains. The placement of the side framework on the car is not quite correct for the ARR cars but the size of the car is much closer to the size of the cars in Alaska than is that of the only model I have found (an old Con-Cor car) that has framing that is identical to the Alaska cars. I have several more of these cars that I need to paint and letter.

4. The fourth cars is a ARR 905-918 series “hot” car that was an insulated boxcar built on a Panama Flat Car frame in the Anchorage shops in 1923-24. For this car, I started with a Micro-Trains 40’ wooden reefer. I removed the ice bunkers, matched the scribing on the roof and built a solid roof where the bunkers had been, put a servicing hatch for the “inside the car” stove on one side and a smoke stack on the roof. Then the work started. To replicate the frame I had to file down the center beam on the MT kit, smooth out all of the rough spots on the frame and then remove and fit a set of six truss rods from a Bachmann 40’ logging flat car. After I got everything to fit I finished assembling the car, painted and lettered it, set it on trucks and relaxed to watch it perform.

5. The fifth car is another Athearn wooden freight car, this time, a 36’ reefer that I made up into a ARR 1501-1506 series ARR reefer. The work was relatively straightforward in that all that was required was to convert the frame to a steel frame, add the service door for the car heater stove and put a stack for the heater on the roof. Painting and lettering completed the job.

6. The next three cars are similar to ones that are on your website in the work Pat Durand has done in HO. They are Intermountain, wood side, drop bottom gondola that of the ARR 4250-4299 series where all that had to be done was painting and lettering. The lettering is not quite as prototype as I would like. This is because I found that the spacing, both vertical and diagonal, on the steel framework would not accommodate the “A.R.R.” part of the lettering where it was supposed to be. So, I stacked it in the one panel without diagonal framework. I have six of these cars in service right now with four more on the way and they are among my favorites on the railroad. They run well, look good and have that used equipment look that is so ARR for the 1925-1948 time period.

7. Finally, we have my favorite caboose. The car on this train is an Athearn wooden, truss rod caboose that had very extensive modification to become one of the four Colorado Midland Cabooses that came to ARR in 1921 (I have finally identified the specific Colorado Midland cars that came to AEC/ARR and became ARR 1013-1016, along with the exact date of purchase by AEC). The work on the conversion started with cutting out a window on each side and replacing it with a side door and adding a step to get up to the door. I then built a tool box for the underframe (I will do that differently on the second conversion). I then got a cupola that I found on Shapeways  designed to fit this car and that had a Bombay roof that made it look like one of the ATSF/CM cabooses. This was followed by creating a marker lamp for the cupola roof out of an old HO roundhouse switch lamp and installing it along with the appropriate jewels for the lights. Finally, I added roof walks along the side of the cupola per the way it would have looked on ARR just after arrival from the CM. Next, of course, was painting and lettering using decals I created about eight or ten years ago. As a historic note, these cars lasted a long time given that they were built in 1887. I have found a picture of one of them, as heavily rebuilt in Anchorage over the years (lost the side door, Bombay cupola,etc.), on a work train made up of post war troop sleepers in about the 1948 to 1952 time period. It looked to be in much better shape than did it’s two sisters that were on the Midland Terminal Railroad in Colorado when it was abandoned in 1949. Not bad for a second hand, wooden car.

So, that is the train as you see it in the video. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed creating the equipment. I have some other ARR equipment from that era but ran out of room to take it with me on the trip first of all to Vancouver, then on the “Canadian” (with Rod and five other crazy people like us but all of whom are in the railroad industry) to Toronto and then a drive to Windsor. When you are going that far, you want to travel as light as possible, so I couldn’t bring everything (thus, my Panama flat cars and flat cars converted to gondolas, and a good deal of other ARR cars were left behind). Incidentally, at Central Hobbies in Vancouver, I found some cars that are not available in the States that look like they will be just right to use as the basis to reproduce the second set of ARR refrigerator cars, the 1507-1513 series, 40’ cars. Four more rebuilds on the way! 

February 20, 2024

John,

Here is another video with my ARR equipment on my friend’s CP layout. He filmed this about 10 days ago after we had done a round trip on the Canadian from Toronto to Vancouver and then back to Toronto. We thought that eight days and nights on a train with a group of professional railroaders would be a good way for me to celebrate my retirement from the rail industry. That turned out to be correct!

The train in the video is very different from the one that I sent you last year (after a similar trip - except being only one way). This year I decided to go with a 1984 era freight train coming out of Seward with loaded pipe cars and empty tank cars along with a few empty CN boxcars that would be set out at Portage for the barge to Prince Rupert.

As for the details of the train:

The 2 F7 locomotives are recent Intermountain purchases,

The first two tank cars are Micro-Trains - out of the box,

The five 42’ gondolas are 40 year old Atlas cars that have had their frames replaced with Kadee metal frames and Micro-trains trucks and couplers added. The pipe loads in these cars are all brass which results in a very heavy (for N scale) freight car,

The log flat car converted to pipe car is from an Atlas log car and was rebuilt to approximate the ARR flat cars that received log bunks for pipe service in 1984 from scrapped Northern Pacific log cars. I’m working on converting five more of these cars.

The three CN boxes are all Atlas, rebuilt with the Kadee frames like the the gondolas,

Two of the tank cars are Athearn 20,000 gallon cars with their trucks and couplers replaced by Micro-trains units,

Two of the other 20,000 gallon tank cars are ones I rebuilt back in the early 1980s by putting together the body parts of Atlas mini tanks (like the one behind the 20,000 gallon cars in the video) and adding Micro-Trains trucks and couplers,

Finally, the caboose, another early 1980s project, is from some forgotten maker with the body redone to match the ARR 1085-1087 series cars and then mounted on a Kadee caboose frame (also available separately back then) and with Micro-Trains trucks and couplers added.

The only thing left for me to do for my Seward train is to track down some "Alaska Agricultural” grain cars that might have operated from North Pole to a tiny grain terminal built in Seward if the state’s grain export project had gone together in the mid 1980s.

All of the equipment has also been equipped with Intermountain steel wheels - incredible is the only word for the improvement in running quality, not to mention the better sound that you get from the equipment rolling.