B&O Class P-13 Well Cars

Well not seeing the insides is fine to look at a photograph, but to build a reasonable copy for a model railroad project needs a little more.  The equipment diagram is available and provides some really important dimensions, and more construction clues.  Still lots is missing.  The images in Figure 2 show that a higher view photo will definitely help, but even more information is needed to build one of these.

It helps having some basic understanding of strength of material, and structural forces.  Observing the construction of bridges and various railcars for examples helps a lot when trying to imagine what the design engineer was thinking.  And then taking clues from the visible structure conjure up suitable hidden structural replacements for what may have been in the original design.

These drawings can be an adventure.  Here is an oops changed into a no-oops.  This oops was discovered adding sample 33 inch wheels (done just sort-of for fun, well... obviously it should be done all the time, even for just-a-drawing).

13 April 2018:  Some work was done studying and locating the brake wheel on the car from the photographs.  Here is an overview of where the brake wheel seems to go (Figure 5):

You may note the brake wheel design itself is just a stand-in, the real brake wheels seem to be dished up on one end, and down on the other.  So some effort was made to figure out what these wheels might be like.  For now, the best has been a modification of the swirled wheel design from photos provided by Ed Kirstatter from the O-48 project.  The improved design from that effort was dished up and down about two inches.  Here are photo-matched images from the drawing with the dished wheels in place (Figure 6):

More later....