The need to start replacing half-inch T&G car siding on a 100 year old L car at the IRM has come up. We can run the stuff ourselves and are used to milling Southern Pine and Poplar. I myself think the Pine better and closer to as built.
Cypress has been suggested.
Anyone out there have any words of wisdom on this subject.

I'm sitting here in an 88-year-old house with cypress siding that has been through Ohio winters, several hurricanes and a huge flash flood and still looks decent. While it may not be as built, if you can work with the cypress and it fits the budget, I'd go with it.

We used Poplar on 1887 car57 as this was what was on their originally, but make sure you glue and nail it as it wants to twist a lot.

Mike Pannell

We have several narrow gauge boxcars that we have re-sided with cypress instead of the yellow pine over the past 4 years.

There has been discussion on this board that cypress of today is not "heart" cypress of yesterday and is probably over priced and will not wear as well as hoped, but I will tell you right now that we have been nothing but pleased with the cypress we have used and highly recommend it.

It cuts and shapes very well, and we have had zero shrinkage and warpage issues, even with our dry winter/humid summer cycles here in the southeast. WE have not had any issues with splitting when nailing it, whatever, and it accepts oil primer like a dream.

By contrast, the yellow pine, hemlock, and even oak timbers we have cut and sit out to air dry for months/years will warp and twist to a far greater degree than the cypress.

I HIGHLY recommend it!!!

Matt Bumgarner
www.newtondepot.com

It's an artifact. Use the as-built wood. No debate.

It made it 100 years. With today's preparations/paints/varnishes and because it won't be outside in Chicago winters it will last 200 hundred years. Is that long enough?

1/2' seems thin... way too thin. I would expect 3/4" or 7/8" an least.

Many woods were used... we have a passenger car with redwood, Douglas fir, and popular, in two different knife cuts.

Your restoration target may help guide your choice.

Alternately choose a good wood, replace all, paint, put the car inside. Keep a record of what you did and why, what the old was (preferably with samples saved) for the historic record.

The key is to preserve the record of what it was, what you did to it, and why.

Randy

This is a passenger car, for heavens sake. Not the place to use that big honkin' plank. The MCB (later ARA, later AAR) standard for car siding for freight cars was 13/16" thick and either 3-1/4" or 5-1/4" wide with a center groove, giving the appearance of 2-5/8" wide strips. The car siding in question is positively dainty in comparison, likely 1-5/8" or less in width. I would double check to be certain it's not 9/16" thick, however.



I agree with using the historically accurate species, if available. We never see redwood car siding here in the Midwest, it must have been a thing with the builders on the Pacific Coast. Doug Fir is only good if you can get it edge sawn, otherwise the wide bands of early and late wood will shed paint. Yellow pine would seem to have the same problem, and in addition is too resinous to hold paint well

If I had to just pick a wood, I'd use poplar. It's not resinous, finer grained than any of the coniferous specious already mentioned, and harder, too. Yet it machines very nicely, and holds paint very well.

Now that I think back, I always wondered why when I was at the Chicago Transit Authority in the seventies, they stocked 1/2" S2S poplar in the storeroom system. I wonder if it dated back to the days they were still maintaining wood cars? It seems once something was in the system, it was never dropped. They still stocked 14-24 hex nuts... the little pile of ONE GROSS boxes looked like it hadn't been touched in years.

Depending on the level of accuracy / anticipated use........

I've put half-inch T&G over a 1/2" plywood sheathing on cars before that had 15/16" T&G as original. The plywood was glued and screwed....like Strasburg but lighter. The cars in question were static outdoor displays, and I was also able to put a builders' paper layer between the ply and the finish for limiting moisture infiltration to just the finish layer. The car will (hopefully) never need structural repairs in the walls again, unless they let the windows leak. Everything was backprimed / primed also. Never hurts to add protection whenever you can.

Poplar was commonly used in the southeast for passenger car siding. It's pretty clear and smooth. Your mileage may vary.

dave

Marty - today's wood is not yesterday's wood - "It's all crap today"

To expand on what Jim said a little, there is a problem with most of the wood currently available. The fast growth in a protected environment results in woods that are weak and lack rot resistance. I am aware of two restorations which had to be done over because poplar rotted in only a few years. To avoid this problem some car restorations are being done with cypress rather than poplar.

I found that using recycled wood that may have been cut 100 years ago or longer is a very good way to go. The old growth timber has straight tight grain. It is harder, stronger, and holds paint better. Drying is not an issue, it will not warp, split or shrink. We used old factory 12 X12 timbers and resawed then on a 36 inch band saw. A metal detector will be required to find the nails. We always cut off and discarded the outside layer so old paint was not an issue. These is a fair amount of waste, as you have to take what is available and find your part inside of it. I have not made siding, but we did make T and G flooring from the 12 X 12s.

You will need someone with some knowledge of sawmill practices. Big timbers will probably be boxed heart. To get verticle grain siding you will need to plan your cuts carefully. The results will be spectacular.

At the NW Ry Museum I saw some really good looking southern pine and tulip(?) popular and was able to find in Seattle some reasonable mahogany for big bucks. (Richard, please jump in here.)

So I'd like a little more discussion. You have to remember Jim is out at Campo. He's lucky to find a Home Depot within 100 miles.

Tulip poplar is correct - it's commonly called poplar although it is in the Magnolia family. Real poplar is in the willow family and is not used much commercially.

Magnolia wood is hard to tell from tulip-poplar (yellow-poplar) - when I helped teach wood anatomy at Berkeley the only way we taught was by microscopic examination of the perforation plates between adjacent vessel cells.