I have enough freight cars to justify something heavier than a Mogul to pull them. I got a couple of Pacifics, but those are passenger engines. So when I saw this old AHM Bershire at the Spring Show, for decent price, I took it home with me. It runs, with a lot of sparking from the motor. It needs Kadee couplers in the pilot and on the tender. It needs all the weight I can pack into it. It needs the bright stainless handrails blackened or painted. There is a Helix Humper replacement motor out there for $40. Which is what I paid for the locomotive. Gotta think about that. The flanges are a little deep, but it makes it around my code 100 layout 22 inch curves OK.
Painting for the home road, B&M is a little up in the air. The only Berkshires on the B&M were the T1 class which featured huge Coffin feedwater heaters, mounted on the boiler front and shading it like the bill of a baseball cap. Distinctive, some called them ugly. Not sure if I want to go that way. I could ignore the wheel arrangement and detail and paint her like she was an R1, 4-8-2. Or I could decorate herfor some local road like the Rutland or Canadian National which shared B&M tracks.
And here we have a Mantua Mikado. Runs OK. Does not need any more weight. Does need a Kadee in the pilot. And clean and paint and decal. Again, we have a problem with a convincing home road story. The B&M did not use Mikados. The only ones on the property were five Erie Mikes, with Vanderbilt tenders, that only lasted a year before they were traded back to the Erie. Or we could do a foreign road, New Haven say.
I’m posting this to stir up some ideas, before I start bending metal.
You don’t mention era – but if currently a Mogul 2-6-0 is your engine, with a few exceptions such as Green Bay & Western, Wabash, or Boston and Maine, Moguls were circa 1900 or before and most were retired by the 1920s. B&M kept their Moguls going for a long time, and they were huskier than the old 2-6-0s that other railroads retired. I have seen photos of the B&M 2-6-0s pulling some pretty impressively long trains.
It also isn’t clear if you are merely thinking of new painting and lettering or actual redetailing. But it does seem that you are at least somewhat concerned about prototype plausability – having at least a story to tell about why this or that engine is on the layout.
The AHM/Rivarossi Berkshire is purely a Nickle Plate engine, Lima Super Power of a type being built in the 1940s so there is quite a time gap there. It resembles also the Pere Marquette 2-8-4, and slightly resembles the Erie and C&O 2-8-4s as well, but basically the engine is pure Nickle Plate., built to haul long trains at very high speeds.
The old Mantua 2-8-2 at least has the advantage that it is generic and is not really a model of any one railroad’s Mikado, although some experts have declared that the straight boiler (which as you might notice is actually D shaped and not rounded at the bottom!) is probably closest to a Wabash prototype. In essence the Mantua 2-8-2 is a blank canvas and with the right detail parts it can resemble engines from many railroads – different cabs, smokebox fronts, pilots, and tenders, and adding some piping or grinding away the running boards and making new ones can make remarkable differences. In fact Tyco/Mantua’s ads in MR inside front cover used to feature photos of just such conversions that modelers would send in to them.
The Mantua 2-8-2 has the additional advantage that there probably were some railroads
For the Mikado, you could assume it is on loan from MEC. This is plausable as B&M and MEC were under common ownership. Highball Graphics has the decals you would need for this.
Depending on much work you want to put into your Berk you could replace the sandome, pilot and add the feedwater heater and capture the flavor of a T-1.
Yeah, Precision Scale offers a nice-looking Coffin fwh - I’ll be using one on a Bachmann Consolidation in an upcoming project.
As for Moguls, the CNR had a bunch of them and used them pretty-much until the end of steam.
Here’s a friend’s model of a CN Mogul - I recently re-motored, re-geared, and re-wheeled it (zincpest in the driver centres), and then, naturally, re-painted it, too. [:D]
This one, my own, is an ex-B&M B-15, from Samhongsa. I re-built the slide valve cylinders to piston valve types, and replaced the old-style cab with one from a Bachmann Consolidation. I also re-piped it and added a few details. It has a boiler-mounted can motor, and is a nice runner and decent puller, too. The tender was also modified somewhat.
This one is the IHC Mogul. It was re-worked to more closely ressemble the ex-B&M loco. The original oil tender was shortened and given an open coal bunker. The two run well together, although the 34 starts sooner and will drag the 37 and the trailing train for the first few scale yards. [swg]
I don’t know enough about the B&M to recommend any particular locomotive, but the Tyco/Mantua Mikado is a blank canvas, and could be made into just about anything. Here’s one which I did probabl
