NWRR Loco and Passenger Car Once you have a Nature's Wonderland locomotive, the next thing you need are ore cars. Fortunately, Hartland Locomotive Works has provided a great starting point with their Hartland Paper Company G Scale Mini Gondola Car; Hartland Mini Gondola Car The scale of this car is nearly a perfect match to the LGB Baldwin 0-4-0 we converted. The actual size of the car is 90% of the correct dimension, but the height of the sides makes a great match to the engine. Side Panels prior to painting We needed to remove the stakes in the middle of the car sides - a modelers back saw and file worked well for that. Next, we fabricated panels to simulate the NWRR ore car sides out of Evergreen V-Groove 4250 styrene sheet. The lateral and diagonal planks were cut from the same sheet stock as the side and end panels. The corner posts on the car body were 0.2" square, so the 0.080 thickness of the built-up inserts was a good match. The end r
Several months ago I decided to create a full scale CAD model of the locomotive from the Nature's Wonderland Railroad using Autodesk Fusion 360 CAD software. That effort was aided greatly by James Keeline's impressive collection of vintage Disney documentation and memorabilia. Fusion 360 CAD Rendering I was already aware of Sam Towler's Mine Train Thru Nature's Wonderland HO Scale model . It is an impressive labor of love. I wasn't looking to start a project of that magnitude, but still wanted to have the correct look and feel of the original NWRR engine, tender and cars. The engine was designed by R. L. Stein and the cars were done by Bob Gurr, who also had some recollections of the tender/power unit. Mine Train thru Nature's Wonderland HO Scale Model Looking around for reference material and a real scale model to start from, I discovered there aren't many scale model locomotives which looked like the NWRR engine. For some reason the Porter