Kaslo Shops Distributing - NK-06 - CN 36' Fowler Boxcar Kit – Wood Roof - Canadian National

Specific Item Information: CN 36' Fowler Boxcar Kit – Wood Roof
The kit consists of resin castings, with the floor, sides and ends in one piece. The modeler adds the roof, door of choice (several provided), running boards, etc. Trucks, couplers and weight to be supplied by the modeler. No paint or decals included.
This model is typical of the 36' wooden boxcars that roamed the rails carrying freight all across Canada and the U.S.A. for half a century, a few lasting until the 1960's. These boxcars carried wheat and other grains to market along with manufactured goods of all kinds. 33,000 of these cars were built between 1896 and 1914. These wooden single-sheathed steel frame boxcars had a capacity of 40 tons and a tare weight of 20 tons and 2,448 cubic feet of space. They were outfitted with archbar Simplex trucks. In the 1920s and 1930s many of these cars were rebuilt with metal roofs.
Other railroads across the continent also used tens of thousands of similar cars. They were designed by W. E. Fowler, CPR Master Car Builder, who later patented this weight-saving design which became known as the Fowler boxcar. Prior to the Fowler design, boxcars typically had wooden structural members sandwiched between an interior and exterior wooden skin. The Fowler car eliminated the exterior layer of wood, producing a cheaper, lighter car that could carry a greater payload. This design also prevented grain leakage at seam between the floor and the side of the car.
The Fowler boxcars were generally used to carry grain and other dry bulk commodities until about 1960, when they began to be replaced by specialized top-load/bottom-discharge covered hopper cars. Dry bulk commodities shipped in boxcars were literally poured into the open doorway of the car, into which a bulkhead four to six feet high had been inserted to form a largely closed box. When the car arrived at its destination, it was usually unloaded by men with shovels. This was an expensive and laborious process, particularly in Canada where transportation of grains, ores and other dry bulk commodities were so significant to the economy.

Model Information: Freight Car body kits

Road Name History: The Canadian National Railway Company (reporting mark CN) is a Canadian Class I railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec that serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States. CN's slogan is "North America's Railroad". CN is a public company with 24,000 employees. It had a market capitalization of 32 billion CAD in 2011. CN was government-owned, having been a Canadian Crown corporation from its founding to its privatization in 1995. Bill Gates was, in 2011, the largest single shareholder of CN stock.

CN is the largest railway in Canada, in terms of both revenue and the physical size of its rail network, and is currently Canada's only transcontinental railway company, spanning Canada from the Atlantic coast in Nova Scotia to the Pacific coast in British Columbia. Its range once reached across the island of Newfoundland until 1988, when the Newfoundland Railway was abandoned.

Following CN's purchase of Illinois Central (IC) and a number of smaller US railways, it also has extensive trackage in the central United States along the Mississippi River valley from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Today, CN owns about 20,400 route miles (32,831 km) of track in 8 provinces (the only two not served by CN are Newfoundland & Labrador and Prince Edward Island), as well as a 70-mile (113 km) stretch of track (see Mackenzie Northern Railway) into the Northwest Territories to Hay River on the southern shore of Great Slave Lake; it is the northernmost rail line anywhere within the North American Rail Network, as far north as Anchorage, Alaska (although the Alaska Railroad goes further north than this, it is isolated from the rest of the rail network).

The railway was referred to as the Canadian National Railways (CNR) between 1918 and 1960, and as Canadian National/Canadien National (CN) from 1960 to the present.

Read more on Wikipedia.

Brand/Importer Information: Kaslo Shops Distributing was formed in 1998 in an effort to supply the modelling community with top quality parts and kits.

We specialize in:
- Detail Parts
- Locomotive Resin Kits
- Cab Kits

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