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Ridge Road Station had a sale on AMS Flatcars in January 2009, for just under $30.  

I bought three of them as I figured it would cost me at least that much for a pair of trucks and couplers.  These have all the underbody detail included as well!  

I don’t really like flatcars as it’s pretty obvious when you don’t have a load; I decided I would make something different:  a ventilated boxcar.  

Though there weren’t many in narrow gauge, they were a popular car in the early part of the 20th century and were used to carry fruit and vegetables.  

The first step was to remove all of the hardware from the flatcar.  

There's some nice brass steps that I'll reuse, as well as the couplers and lift bars.

Since I'll be adding siding, it's a bit wide, so I cut the rest off by running it through the table saw.

I painted the top to look less red.

I got some scribed sheets from Ozark and cut them to shape.  

Then I used my little Microlux jigsaw to cut the openings.  

The vent openings were framed with plastic angle pieces.  

I notched the back side of the vents to put in some .047" music wire.  I was originally going to use some 1mm brass wire, but I really like the music wire as it doesn't bend as easily.  It is quite a bit harder to cut, but at least it doesn't deform when I'm inserting it.

Of course I didn't want to have an empty ventilated boxcar.  

My next stop was to go to Ozark Miniatures website; they have some free crates that you can print out and assemble.  

I built some forms out of styrene, some others out of wood, and used  spray adhesive to glue the cut out crates to the forms.  One caveat; they come four to a sheet of paper and half of the oranges and half of the apples have the lettering reversed - mirror image if you will.  I'm not sure too many folks will be able to tell.

Next, I started to add the detail parts.  

I was going to make ladders, but I looked in my scrap box and saw that I had plenty of grab irons and NB from Phil's Narrow Gauge, and decided to use them instead.  

The other parts are made from styrene and some NB that I had on hand.  

I used the stirrup steps that I had taken off the flatcar.