It’s time to conclude my Cricut printed car sides experiments. In the end, I’ve not been able to replicate the beaded siding that graced most Canada Atlantic house cars. However, the single-score method might be good enough to represent passenger car siding.
In photographs, the freight car siding looks like alternating deep and shallow grooves. However, I was not able to get sufficient variation between grooves to be noticeable. The Cricut scoring head does not appear to make a deeper groove with multiple passes. Making multiple passes with the scoring head does, however, often break down the surface of the paper, and rub the ink off.
In a last ditch attempt, I tried scoring individual boards attached to carriers, and then recombining them. The lettering stretched the limit of the Cricut bleed algorithm, and was unclear in places and illegible in others. Worse, the scoring head and the cutting head are about half a millimetre out of registration with one another. So, although I had programmed a score line on top of the cut lines in the hopes of deadening the bur thrown up by the knife, that score line didn’t coincide with the cut, and the mid-board score line was not centered on the board. In short, this last ditch attempt made a mess!
Most of the experiments were on Staples photo paper. However, the best results were a single score on Epson Premium Photo Paper. This paper is too glossy to register on the Cricut, and so I had to give it a quick Krylon matte varnish coating before passing the paper through the Cricut. A single pass with the scoring head makes a pleasing subtle board pattern, which could enable passenger car siding.
Pembroke:87 
Did you try manually scoring them as one did in the olden times?
Ah
Yes, I did. It’s difficult to control the pressure, but certainly if you score heavily enough to make a noticeable difference, the paper breaks down.