Pulpwood Truck

We had one extra spur without a specific industry (the far right-hand spur inside the ovals) on the layout.  The first thought was to use a junk yard idea from a recent "Model Railroading".  That looked like it would be fun, even though it would not say "Southeast" like cotton does.  On further reflection, a pulpwood yard came to mind.  I already had a pulpwood rack from my childhood, so we picked up another rack, and thought about other details.

The 50's in the Southeast saw lots of "bobtail" pulpwood trucks on their way to the pulpmill or wood yard.  So, that seemed like a good detail.  This is what I was aiming for (note the Southern Railway rack, more later):

See this link by Louis the "Desertdrover":

http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=23128

Also, this site includes instructions for building a pulpwood truck.  I took his lead!

Instead of Louis's International Harvestor truck, I used another 41/46 Chevy (like the cotton truck, MiniMetals) but this time it was a tandem axle and was intended to be used as a tractor-trailer rig.  Pulling the fifth wheel was not too tough and that left two, straight rails from the frame.  I used a scale 6 inches of 3/32" styrene tubing for the tubes to hold the vertical logs at the rear of the truck.  That's about an 8-inch tube, which is certainly on the large side, but it seemed to look OK.  Used the same tubing for the front verticals, but drilled the tubes out a little with a 1/16" bit to make the walls thinner on the tops of the tubes.  The tubes are a scale 8-feet long/tall.  Added a roughly 3-foot cross-pipe at 6 feet up the front tube.  All that was glued on with CA cement after getting a coat of flat black acrylic paint.

The fun was trying to figure out what to use for pulpwood.  The linked article (above) suggested left-over Christmas tree/wreath.  However, I felt his load of pulpwood had too much bark and was too big in diameter.  I found another site with a 2007 L&N Magazine containing an article about L&N's pulpwood racks from the 50's by Bob Chapman.  This article listed L&N's total racks at 926, but Southern Railway had the most of any line at 3264.  I felt justified in choosing a woodyard for our Southern layout!  Chapman suggested that commercially available racks by Atlas have logs that are too big -- 9 to 27" in diameter.  So, I was hoping to get more toward the 4 to 12" variety with less bark to wood.  I walked out to the back yard and found some small pine twigs -- but they were pretty "barky".  A dead oak branch looked promising and two other hardwood varieties were selected.

I cut one length to about 5 feet, scale, and used it to cut the others.  At first, I kept all four varieties separate:

Notice the two longer sticks (v-shaped) for the rear supports.  After I thought I had a sufficiency, I started the process of gluing things together.  I used white glue for the pulpwood and tried to include small and large logs throughout the load.

Since I didn't like the looks of the pine "sticks" and wasn't too pleased with the looks of one of the unknown species, I soon found that I was combining the remaining two piles of wood as I went.  My father, a woodlands and wood procurement manager for several pulp mills, would probably not be pleased with this load of "mixed hardwoods"!?!  I finished  with a slightly rounded top and THEN checked to see what the maximum highway height was -- 13.5 to 14.5 feet is what I found on the Internet.  I estimated this load to be about 12.3 feet, so I'm good.  However, it would not surprise me for pulpwooders to get every stick on their truck they could! 

I'm debating whether to use cable/chain to hold the load on.  I'm pretty sure something was used. . . .

Louis (link, above) added mudflaps.  That's a nice touch, and maybe another addition.  Pulpwood trucks are more in need of weathering than cotton stakeside trucks.  These trucks spent time in the woods and suffered from a good bit of mis-use and abuse.  Again, I just cannot bring myself to weathering, yet!

I also need to find a loader for the trains -- a large fork lift or a crane of some sort with a sling would fit.  Another Clever Brothers structure, the yard shed, will probably be used for this spur.  What else?