Hobbies on steem, my O scale narrow gauge ore cars

Hello, steemians! Welcome to my page, eh!

Recently, I've been doing model kit reviews on steem as part of my efforts to promote posting about our hobbies on the steem blockchain. Today's post is not a video, but it's about one of my long time hobbies, model railroading. I've enjoyed the model railroad hobby since I was a kid, and I've had model railroad equipment is several scales and gauges. I've also been a fan of narrow gauge railroads for many years, especially the 3 foot gauge railroads of Colorado and the 2 foot gauge railroads of Maine. The subject of this post is a set of 3 cars that I built in O scale, which is 1/48th scale. That means that each actual inch is equivalent to 48 scale inches.

I believe that I built these cars in the early 2000s, possibly 2003 or 4, I don't really remember. The oldest pictures that I have of them are from about that time. This picture was taken in the basement of the house that I was living in at the time. The ore cars are the white cars on the left side of the picture.

These cars stayed very much unfinished for many years, and spent a few years in a box after I moved. I've had them on display on a shelf for the past few years, and a month or so ago, I decided that I wanted to paint them, finally. I didn't think to take any pictures of the process until after I had already painted the hopper part of the cars. The hoppers are separate from the car frames, so it's easier to paint the parts with spray cans. I decided to paint the hoppers black and the frames brown. The hoppers represent steel construction, and the frames represent wood beam construction.

After reassembling the cars, I took a few pictures of them.

I think they look much better now that they're painted. The train on the bridge on the lower shelf is HO scale. The O scale engine in front of the ore cars is made by Bachmann, this engine is one of the first engine types that they made for O scale narrow gauge.

I still need to finish these cars by putting on the small details such as the brake gear, but they're mostly done now.
These cars are not a direct copy of any existing full size cars, but they are similar to cars that were in use during the first half of the 20th century. The track gauge that these cars run on is roughly 30 inch gauge, they are O scale cars that run on HO gauge track. That makes it easier and less expensive to get readily available track to run the equipment on. Bachmann has been making ready to run trains in On30 gauge for more than 20 years now, and it has made getting into O scale narrow gauge railroading much easier and less expensive. There are now several other companies that make On30 scale equipment, and although it's not as inexpensive as it used to be, it's still widely available.

Well, that's it for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
I will be continuing this series of hobby related posts, so stay tuned for more!

Thanks for stopping by my page to check out my post, eh!
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