NMRA British Region Forum

Welcome Ben, I can't help you with your question, but I'm intrigued about the factyou model in TT. It's a fairly uncommon scale as far as US model railroading is concerned to my knowledge, but I do know that it is going through a bit of a revival in Europe, particularly since the fall of the Berlin wall, TT being a very popular scale in the former GDR.

Looking forward to what you build, make sure you share some pictures.

Koos

Fascinating - and I agree there's plenty of railroading to be had with just an SW1200 and a geep.

Their site appears to be down but i've found some test-shots of the SW1200 and it looks great!

What kind of info are you looking for ref the woodchip hoppers? Drawings for 'modern' US stuff seem fairly few and far between unfortunately, one thought might be to get an HO one and use that to scale from?

Even for a big road like the BN you could model an 80s secondary route/branch line credibly with just a suitably varied collection of geeps...

Back to the cars - I can't say i've ever scratchbuilt any cars in HO (one of the attractions for US HO to me coming from a background of modelling something with no good RTR available is I don't have to do that anymore!) - but from what I can recall of my OO days when there wasn't much other choice is that the way to reduce the bowing is to always build using an odd numbers of layers - gluing two layers together (such as gluing ribs to flat sheet for a car side) will try and 'pull' the flat sheet into a curve, so you need to laminate something the other side to counter that effect...

Once you get beyond the flat sides i'd be amazed if your prototypes didn't have some kind of internal structure as well to keep the sides on the (real) car straight, that can help keep it square on a model also - especially as the model will try and bow inwards, whereas the ones on the real cars are usually to try and stop the sides from bending outwards!

(The absolute easiest way is to model it loaded - then it's really simple to make it a 'box' structure that won't warp)

Another alternative is to look for anything at all, including European outline, that can be used as a base for your conversions. Even if you have to do a big butchery job, you may be able to add your own scratchbuilt sides etc onto the pared-down sides of a car that's available to buy. That should then solve the bowing problem. Replacing trucks is a relatively easy thing to do. It depends on "how close" you want your hoppers to be, and how much time you wish to spend on them, prior to running.