Western Railroads: History and Modeling

Modeling Loads: Utility Poles By: Jack Pappas As I have grown my model train collection, I have gotten to the point where my gondolas and flatcars need loads to make the trains look more realistic. I have tons of ideas for loads and most of them involve scratch building the loads. Today we will take a look at how I built this utility pole load. The completed load in a Western Pacific 52' Mill Gondola. I started off with wooden dowels (1/8"x12") obtained from Woodcraft. These came to close to a scale one foot in diameter and 86' in length.  I also obtained dunnage in the form of 1/16"x1/16"x36" balsa wood from Hobby Lobby. Other materials used were India ink, alcohol (71% or 90% works), sand paper, a drill, a cutting saw, and some spare time. I knew that 1' diameter poles would be hard to find a prototype of, especially from the era I model (1965), so I took some modelers license when building this load. All the tools I used in this