Elevated Sanding Hopper at the JSSX

I post occasionally at trainorders.com, and a few weeks ago someone commented about the elevated sanding hopper on the JSSX that was in the background of one of my photos. I thought that this time we'd have a look at that feature, which towers above the shop track. This interesting structure was given to me several years ago by my friend Luc Sabourin.

At some point the yellow safety railings around the top had broken off, so I've just recently rebuilt and replaced them.  Gotta maintain the safety of the worksite!

I don't remember who assembled the sanding hopper model for Luc, but it sure is a nice feature for me to have on the JSSX.

A neat feature included are the "ropes" that hold the two sand hoses out of the way as locomotives pass under the sand hopper.

An end view of the hopper with a leaser engine edging up to the structure

And a look from the opposite side.

And one more thing...

It's always a bit surprising to me when I'm searching online for something that has to do with model railroads, and one of the responses that Google comes back with is an image of one of my own models.  That's just what happened a couple of weeks ago, after emailing back and forth with the George Dutka about an Evans boxcar.

The car below isn't the specific one that George and I were emailing about, but later on when I searched "Evans boxcar photos" on Google, this old photo of one my own freight cars popped up...

Pretty sure I've told this story before, but I was never actually all that happy with the way this car looked after I'd patched and weathered it.  In fact, I took it to a train show to sell, but apparently no one else at that show liked it all that much either.  It came back home with me and sat in the cupboard for some time, until I eventually got ambitious and completely re-did the work I'd put into it.

The number is different after the second time around, but this is the exact same car as in the photo above.  I really like this revised version much better, and now it's out on the layout pretty consistently.

The same Evans boxcar in the same location on the layout yesterday afternoon, with a new reporting mark number and paint that has been faded as well. Instead of the somewhat stark white patches that I had painted the first time, the car now has more muted grey patches that have been faded as well.