In 2022, I started a Union Pacific Harriman 40′ box car by Westerfield (1754 B-50-1/2/4 40′ DS BOX CAR, MODERN, 1924 & 1936 LETTERING, UP) when life, uh, found a way to impose a modeling freeze. In 2025, this project was resurrected.
Stage 1: 2022 Assembly
By my third resin kit, initial assembly was much smoother than before. It helped that this was a high-quality kit with very thin resin flash:
End and side assembly was routine, but the grabirons were their normal level of tedious:
Dimensions of the sides and underframe matched well:
Record Scratch
Stage 2: 2025 Assembly
The state of Union Pacific shipping via my house saw a substantial increase in 2025 with the resumption of construction of this box car. First I took stock of the condition of the kit after being packed up for a while:
The Sergent extended-length couplers seemed necessary because of the thick coupler pocket holes, but now extend just a little further out than would be ideal. This style of coupler can now be gotten from Prototype Couplers model EC87P100KH.
Roof attachment happened off-camera:
End walks came together like normal, but I could feel my rustiness:
Still getting back into the groove, I failed to document construction of the brake gear and underframe. Here it is in the completed model. Note the uneven grabirons, which are more visible from this angle:
The only slightly weird thing about the underframe is the angle of the brake rods at the end of the levers.
Next, the brake staff. The instructions said to have it raised 6 scale feet above the roof, in my interpretation. This feels like it is way too tall, but I went with it for now and may revise later:
Completed Assembly
All in all, I made one minor visible mistake in 2022 with the grabirons, and the rest of the many imperfections are vintage 2025 lack of practice.
Other than the high brake wheel, things are looking ok from the side. On the top, we can see a few minor blemishes from misapplied CA:
The cut levers were a little too flimsy after sanding and one of them died. Luckily, I had some spare Yarmouth cut levers – not identical, but close enough for this model. The brake hoses are Cal Scale.
Note how the roofwalk end supports (white styrene) are uneven on both ends:
The B end roof cross-walk has an angle that is not quite 90 degrees:
Doing the Washing-Up
Now that the model is assembled, it is almost time to prime and paint. But first, let’s wash the model with soapy lukewarm water and perform a critical review of some remaining areas that need improvement on future models.
Critical Review
The Union Pacific is not my primary modeling interest – more on that in a future post – but the prototype for this model is both period and geographically plausible for my era/location of 1939 US centered on Northern New Mexico, reaching to the Pacific coast and the Midwest US. I want to build up my skills to an acceptable level before tackling house road name cars. This kit has been a move in that direction.
The two big areas I want to improve on a future model assembly are grab iron evenness and improvement of glue joints. I am especially bothered by the four corners of the model, which could have used some Tamiya Putty:
I therefore rate this model as a necessary step demonstrating an intermediate stage of modeling skill toward truly expert modeling.
The next step in this model is painting, naturally. But we have a few other topics to cover before we get there.