This quirkly maintenance-of-way car with truss-rods, which was my first attempt at complete scratchbuilding, appeared in a how-do-do-it article in the September 1975 issue of the now-defunct Railroad Modeler in an article entitled "Homebuilt Weed Sprayer: A Free-Lance Design that Can Fit into any Era of Railroading." The hardest part involved soldering all of those joints on the railings and weed-sprayers, which required making jigs to hold the wires in place. I don't think anyone was more suprised than I was when it all worked.
