Years ago, I worked as a consultant for a database company. A road warrior, often away early Monday morning, returning home Friday evening. It seems like other modellers are able to get some modelling done while travelling; I’ve even heard of a pilot who would build models in the cockpit during long flights. However, the couple of times I tried it, I didn’t like to risk ruining the hotel room with spilled paint or waking up the neighbours with the sound of a Dremel tool.
That changes with 3D CAD. I’ve been travelling a little more with my latest gig – not Mad Max level, but every couple of months. I found a little time in the evenings after catching up all the work I didn’t get done during the day because I was working to start figuring out the cars that might serve coal to the coal dock.
The Canada Atlantic had three groups of cars designated “Coal” in the 1905 ORER. The series 364-541 and 612-694 were both 28″ and 34″ inside height respectively. The latter series had many cars converted with racks, possibly for pulp wood or tanning bark.
The last group, 1300-1359 were six-foot inside height monsters. In 30 years of looking, these are the only hoppers or gondolas that appear in a photo – a string of them in the yard at Depot Harbor. I speculate that these cars were used for engine coal, which I believe came in by boat and was stockpiled west of the grain elevators.
From the perspective of the Pembroke coal dock, these cars offer a conundrum. While their top rail lines up well with the top of the coal dock, the bottom of the hopper would have been almost eight feet lower. How did a couple of guys with shovels get that last bit of coal into the dock?
Conundrum aside, and with the limited information available from the ORER in one hand and John H. White’s The American Railroad Freight Car in the other (actually that’s a lie, that book is too big for one-handed reading), I set to sketching the general shape of one of these cars to see if I could match the look of the prototype photo – all from a hotel room far away from a real modelling desk.
Pembroke:87 
Friend of mine spent his road trip evenings assembling Intermountain kits. During the years of paranoia, he couldn’t carry glue with him so bought cheap CA wherever he landed.
Now I’m trying to sell a carton of his old boxcars with a half-inch pile of detail parts on the bottom.
I recall my era of travelling a lot. I’d read about how so many modellers had tried modelling while on the road and it felt like such a good idea but, wow, did it ever make me self-aware of just what a hotel room is made of.
Most of my trips involved flying and that alone made decisions for me about what I felt comfortable transporting. At least some though were closer to home and I travelled by car, so sneaking in some modelling bits didn’t feel any worse than including a bottle or two of wine and always the evening’s books. Thinking I could model, and it took time to build the courage, I think the first project I made was a quick study for a clinic on turnout controls. All hand tools but cutting pink foam and bonding it all together made me very conscious of all that darn carpet.
Just before the pandemic I was settling into a groove of “I can drive there” work trips and had a series of turnouts I wanted to build for a friend. This was where your comment about the Dremel really hit home. You don’t realise how a mill file on code 83 rail really sounds until you’re forming turnout parts in the middle of the night or, a few solder joints in, how I may as well be smoking cigarettes in here. I gave up.
I love your idea of CAD modelling on the road. Somehow the physical separation from home and the layout seems like the perfect formula to facilitate focussed time drawing on the computer, ready for when you get home, to print. Extravagant as it feels to ask, could you connect your 3D printer to the web and post the image “from the road” so it could be waiting to view by the time you get home? Now, I’m getting carried away.
Chris
LOL, yes! The filing and soldering in the hotel room!
My old Elegoo Mars (v1) doesn’t connect to a network. But it should be possible to connect newer machines to the Internet so you could have the part waiting for you when you get home. One pitfall of the idea is you have to act like you’re not that keen to check it out when your partner greets you at the door!