Mineral Range Freight Equipment

My postings during the holidays has been obviously limited but I have been working on some models and am prepared at this point to share what I have been doing.

I am continuing with modeling the Mineral Range rolling stock.  Since the primary source of revenue for the railroad was servicing copper mines the majority of equipment was comprised of rock cars and flat cars. 

This model represents the 75 flat cars in the 51 to 199 series.  They were primarily used to carry mine timbers.  

This is a model of the 30 ton rock cars.  There were 100 cars in the series 1000 to 1198.  They were used to haul rock from the mine to the stamp mills and coal from the Portage Lake coal docks to the mines.

Since I need a number of these cars I created styrene patterns for the cars, RTV molds and then cast the parts in resin.  No fancy 3D printing for these models, all the pattern work is in 2D and the components are assembled to create a 3D model.  I know how to make patterns and do castings so there was no long learning curve involved or issues with printers.  The cost per complete model is about $15.