hi,
i got this kinda stupid idea from seeing a picture somewhere. it was a picture of a BN GP30 cab with a comment underneath saying “this would make a great childrens playhouse”. there is always diesel parts lying all around maintenance shops. heck, NRE probably has dozens! is this a good (or cool) idea?
Might take some work - I doubt they are all that careful taking those things apart…
Probably have to watch out for the zoning folks, too.
Aside from that, it’s an interesting idea. A friend of mine has a cab inside, complete with short hood and abbreviated long hood… I believe he has working crossing gates on his driveway, too…
Cool idea but I wonder what his/her neighbors think of the driveway crossing gates?
A bit OT, but when I was a boy – late 1950s, early 1960s – the last farmland in South Milwaukee had, on one corner, an old steam shovel. I suspect it originally had wood sides which had entirely rotted away but some of the mechanism was intact and you could still pull on various levers and climb up the boom. The shovel itself was partly imbedded in dirt, possibly where it gave up the ghost for all I know. The crabby old farmer (his name was Fink – no lie!) who owned the land would scream at us to get off his land but since he was still using draft horses to get around his property (and continued to do that right up to my high school graduation in 1970!) we usually had plenty of time to see him coming and vamoose.
It was a great place to play. Dangerous as heck I suppose. A locomotive cab would have been heaven!
Dave “Mike Mulligan” Nelson
I wish my parents had thought of that. Talk about something you could brag about at school!
East of State Center, Iowa along the old two lane what was Hwy 30, is a farm/acreage. The person living here has a GP/SD type high nose and cab in C&NW colors. It may be a playhouse, but I don’t think it’s for the kids/grandkids. His garage also sports a C&NW herald over the door.
Jeff
Seems to me that "Tracks Ahead" once did a segment on someone who put an EMD F or E nose with cab in the basement rec room of the house.
I assume the owners plan to leave it behind when the house is sold.[:D]
hmm…
i saw this in an old MR magazine. this modeler (forgot his name) bought an F (or E) unit cab and nose and had to go though all the paint removal and sandblasting. when he was finished, he stuck most of his train controls in the cab. that would be ultimate model railroading[bow]
P.S. the house where it was located had a removable wall so just in case the couple moved, they could take the cab with them. i doubt it would fit in the moving truck[swg]
… and I worry about moving our baby grand piano! [(-D]
My family owns a construction business and in the woods at the back of the shop there’s a graveyard of old equipment. As kids my brother and used to play there. There was a couple of cabs from old tower cranes, a school bus filled with telephone switchs (the old pull the cord and connect), a couple of jetways from an airport, some big old vats (my brother locked me in a stainless steel milk vat filled with seismic equipment one for a half hour or so). Great place to play as long as we watched out for all the sharp bits and wasp nests. Wouldn’t let my kids anywhere near there though of course.
G’day, Y’all,
When a former president of the Central of Georgia Railroad, C.F. Hanson, retired in 1910, the board of directors awarded him a caboose and a 4-4-0 with a current boiler certificate and put it on his farm under a shed. He planned to make a tourist railroad but never got to. At my job at The Great Train Store in Atlanta, I talked to his grandchildren who told me about playing on the engine when they were growing up. I told that story to a middle aged couple and the wife told me she used to play on that engine when she was a child growing up in that same area. Seems a Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum rep went down and gave the family a sob story about not having a 4-4-0 and got that one. It is out in the elements now and a sign says it is past anything but cosmetic restoration.
Wish I had the space for a full cab in the front of our future train room. Instead, when you enter the door from the outside, I plan on building a facsimile of a tiny little steamer coming out of a cave which will great you with a headlamp, whistle, probably some crossing signal sounds (still working out the lighting effects), etc. No real train parts, but should look effective enough when finished. There will be a secondary door just inside the cave to access the model train room. Many years ago I built large mechanical dragons, spaceships, etc…, so this will be a really fun project and a lot easier than the actual layout will be for me. Did I mention that the train effects will be motion activated on a short delay and meant to startle the #*@& out of those who enter the room? (snicker snicker) -Rob
Make the entrance like entering the cab of a steamer with the entrance to the train room through the tender coal space out the other side of the cab. Revert to heating your house with coal so you can build the cab right in front of your furnace, then you can actually stoke the fire!
Or, if you have taken leave of your senses, make the entrance the front of an F7, E8, or other full width body Dismal, then the engine room door is the entrance to the train layout.
This “foyer” could be a full mockup of the cab (steam or Dismal), with video monitors for the front windows, showing a signal from a video camera mounted in an engine on the layout. Or better yet, running one of the train simulator programs… in that case, forget the train layout, who’d want to leave the cab, anyway?
Semper Vaporo,
Charles T. McCullough
CMBY RY
With train simulators nowadays, think of this: Pick up a cab, refurb it, place a few big screen TVs in the windows, and you could basically feel like you’re driving your loco anywhere in the world! That’d take a serious computer to run, but it would be fun. Maybe the future of model railroading?
Thats what we do.
I thought about the museum’s train simulator when I first read this thread.[:)] Being in the construction industry, I felt a fairly accurate cab like you have could be built out of plywood. Then, all that would be needed, would be that fancy computer you have for the simulator.
What, you mean that 1980’s hunk of s***? LOL
It does its job well though.
Most of the time.[X-)]
Some years ago in TRAINS, possibly under “Would You Believe It”, was a photo of the cab of NP 950 being used as a guard shack by Morrison-Knudsen at Boise. I believe that the rest of NP 950 (it was an S6) was cut down to a slug for one of the Weyerhaeuser operations.