Model Railroading > Intermountain Almost had a Brilliant Idea

My four Willamette & Pacific chip cars had these black foam inserts in the car to keep the sides from bowing in. This is a wonderful foam too. Not too spongy and fairly dense and it easily carves with razor knife. The foam is cut to fit the width of the car, and almost the entire length of the car. I quickly realized it would make a excellent base for a woodchip load. I just needed to sacrifice one block to make the other three blocks of foam long enough to fill the length of the car. I'm using some canopy glue to glue the extra piece onto the end of the blocks. After the glue dries I will carve them to the shape of the load with the razor knife, paint them tan with craft paint and glue sawdust to the top exterior for a removable woodchip load. Now if only Intermountain had cut them to fill the entire car and made the foam tan, they would have a almost ready made woodchip load.

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/09/23 02:52 by funnelfan.

---

Great idea think it might be call temper foam, what are you going to use for netting over the load?

Cant you just cut a sheet of very thin insulation foam (1/4 inch fan fold, or equivalent) to the full dimensions required, hot glue that panel onto the nice stiff block they provided, and build the wood chip pile on top of that?

I left mine in my Apache cars that came today, just pretending it’s black fly ash for now. What are you using for wood chips? Thanks for the post.

Randy in PHX

Posted from iPhone

Well hey, not everyone can think to the size of the box. Some just come up a little short.