Trailers - Setting the Era

Nothing set better an era than road vehicles. During my last trip to a hobby shop, I purchased four trailer trucks, including a bulk one.

Trailers are an ubiquitous sight of industrial areas all over the world, this is particularly true with paper mills and similar rail-served customers.

For such reason, I decided to get rid of my idea to place an office building at Donohue and instead make a mundane semi-trailer parking lot. Yes, it’s the easy way… but it’s also the realistic way. Also, most people easily recognize road vehicles and get a deeper sense of time and era than looking at locomotives and structures.

I’ve been trying to assemble a credible fleet of trailers over the last year. Most of them need to be repainted and get new decals. To be honest, most are proxies and not very accurate models, but it shouldn’t be too much a distraction since the right lettering, colors and level of weathering are much more important.  My goal was to strip their garish paint schemes and replace them with more correct ones.

So here's the result after decalling and weathering them. Getting prototypical Quebec-area trailer decals isn’t an easy task. While Rick Decals makes a very neat line of trailer decals, most are only suitable for the 1990s-2010s era. But yet, they still make two interesting sets that I used.

The first one is a generic woodchip traile. The red color is quite common for these trailers in Quebec area and I made yellow numberboard as can be seen on many local companies woodchip trailers.

The second one is for TNT Overland Express and is suitable circa 1987. It was the result of several express companies merger at that time.

Thethird one is for Steinberg, a famous and now defunct supermarket chain that pioneered this business model in Quebec back in the 1950s. The chain was a gigantic empire that crumbled like a card castle over a sour succession feud. The Steinberg trailer is important to me because the demise of the chain in the very early 1990s clearly indicates the layout is set in the 80s without any doubt. Also, there was a large Steinberg supermarket located on D’Estimauville Avenue back then.  Simply put, Steinberg trucks would have been a daily sight at the grade crossing.

The fourth one is a Woolco trailer. Woolco used to be a large department store chain under Woolworth umbrella. While the American chain got defunct in the early 1980s, the Canadian counterpart survived well into 1994. A very large Woolco used to stand on D'Estimauville Avenue by the track. I remember visiting that store on a regular basis with my parent back then because it was the nearest one in our vicinity. In fact, Woolco is the main reason I have many memories from the old Murray Bay Subdivision in Beauport because we used to drive along the track for many, many miles. Of interest, Woolco was part of a now destroyed shopping center called Les Galeries Sainte-Anne. More about that shopping center on later posts, but keep in mind I'm actually in the process of replicating the large parking lot that was located by the track.

The Woolco decals are custom made from crappy pictures found on the Internet. Deciphering the black lettering required some serious Photoshop tweaking! The result isn't perfect when observed from near, but from a normal distance, it's OK! By the way, I removed the stock hinged doors and replaced them with a rolling door per prototype.

Among other trailers not picturesd here is the Bourassa one which I backdated by removing the web address and aerodynamic flanges.  There is also the CN Supertherm one and an old and original RONA trailer made by Majorette circa 1986. I have three of them which were sold back then in RONA stores (hardware). Me, my brother and my sister had each one. At 1/87, they are fairly decent model for their time and the Kenworth tractors are relatively nice for background models.