In the last minutes of 2020 I sat, bored, at my work bench and decided to start a Tichy 4021 kit I had on hand.

My original plan for the kit was to modify it to be a CNR A-1 Pre-war Flat car, as outlined by Stafford Swain in CN Lines V5 N3- but as will be revealed below that didn’t happen. (But has since happened with a couple other kits, which will be covered in a future blog post.)

I was so into the build that I decided to just build the kit as it was for once, not worrying about making it accurate or performing any major surgery.

This was a nice thought as I built the kit, however after I finished the construction I realized that it’s inaccuracy would bother me if lettered for CN.

So, I began the hunt for a railroad that ran a car close in construction to the Tichy kit as built.

What I came across was the Central of Georgia, whose historical society is restoring a flat car very similar to this, and is even selling Tichy kits packaged with the correct trucks and CG decals with all proceeds going towards the cars restoration. I decided this would make an interesting prototype, and ordered some decals.

I painted the car black, with Vallejo “NATO Black”, and the deck with Tamiya “Wooden Deck Tan” – the latter a recommendation from Pierre Oliver’s November 2020 blog post “Flat car decks, a better way?”.

At this point I managed to knock one of the plastic Tichy stirrups off the car; so I removed the rest of them with my spru cutters and replaced them with A-Line stirrups that I had “squared” up by heating them over a candle, flattening them out and re-bending them with chain nose pliers, a Bill Welch technique, and a worthy upgrade to any car.

After I had the car painted and the stirrups fixed, I applied future floor polish with my airbrush and then lettered the car. The lettering makes the car accurate for about 1947, about ten years before my layout at Vernon River takes place- so if it appears on the siding somebody invented a time machine. After lettering, I simply brushed some future over the decals to seal them and then airbrushed the car with Vallejo Matt Varnish- which is now going to be my go-to flat finish.

Again, following Pierre’s previously mentioned blog post I applied pan pastels to the cars deck. This was my first time using pan pastels and man, I love them! They are so intuitive to use, blend super smoothly and are actually pretty hard to mess up.

While this car isn’t even close to being accurate for my era, it’s still an interesting prototype and is fairly accurate within its self. I’m really happy with how this project turned out, and it was a great test-bed for pan pastels. I am still waiting on the proper Andrew’s trucks to arrive, but I’m way to excited to not share the car just how it is.

Coming down the pipe: an update on my CNR Reefer scratch builds, building two Sylvan CNR Wooden Express Reefer kits (just need to be lettered now), modifying two Tichy flat car kits to CNR A-3 Pre-War Flat cars and scratch building a 46’1” CNR flat.

While my blog posting has been lacking, I’ve been building more now than I ever have before. I have 4 or 5 different projects on the go and it feels really nice to be back at it with the passion I had before.

Stay tuned. CM