Swayne Lumber Skeleton Cars | Century of Steam Flag Stop

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:05]Howdy folks. This is Daniel, the lead modeler for Studio 346. And for our Flag Stop vlog today, we're going to be looking at the Swain and Westside 38T connected truck log cars. Now, connected truck means these are essentially two disconnects with a center frame sill run all the way through both of them rather than using the log to connect two of them. Prior to these cars introduction, both the Swain and Westside Lumber Company used 24 ft Carter Brothers and Hammond flat cars to do their logging.

[00:00:34]But in 1917, the Swain Lumber Company was extending up towards Marramac, California, and that required new locomotives and cars. So they built a hundred of these using hardware from the Pacific Car and Foundry Company, as well as their own lumber. The Swain liked these cars well enough. They were still largely in operation when it deeded itself to the Southern Pacific in 1939 and ceased operation. The Westside Lumber Company bought locomotive number six as well as the 99 surviving log cars built to this design. They immediately standardized around the 38T connected truck as their new log car. They had 12 Pacific Car and Foundry 36 ft skeletons like you will have seen in previous videos. They rebuilt those almost immediately to this connected track design. They then built 58 additional cars either using Pacific Car and Foundry parts or the last 14 use parts taken from Pacific Coast and Nevada, California, Oregon cars that they had scrapped out. That's the history. Let's move on to the model. The base details here are drawn from the type one cars.

[00:01:44]That's the Swain cars. I used drawings by David Braun and by the Society for the Preservation of Carter Railroad Resources. When there was any doubt left by the drawings, I used reference photos largely from car number 77 at the California State Railroad Museum and car 113 at the Nevada County Nargage Museum.

[00:02:04]One of the changes from the preserved cars is I left the draft gear open. The cars today have a covering plate over the top to prevent stuff getting in there.

[00:02:14]The handbrake options I retained from the Pacific Car and Foundry skeletons.

[00:02:19]So there's a tall handbrake which is prototype, a short handbrake or a sidemounted handbrake wheel. The air brakes themselves can either be automatic only or can be the prototype option of automatic and straight air. So you can use either. These cars had three different types of truck historically. I have modeled the tall I-beam version of the Swain truck which has a metal spring support. We can potentially reuse the Russell trucks from our Russell skeleton car. And then there was also a version built by Swain with a shorter I-beam and a wooden spring plank which we haven't built yet. That may come. That's it for now. Thank you for listening. Thank you again to all of our patrons for making this game possible. If you'd like to support our development, you can visit patreon.com/studio346, where for as little as $2 per month, you can see these videos a month early before they go up on YouTube. We'll see you next time.