This is the weekly thread where modelers can show in progress projects, completed projects or just photos of the layout.
I managed to complete a couple more cars this week!
Athearn 2970CF ACF Covered Hopper kit, painted with Scalecoat II MofW Gray and lettered with Herald King Decals. Cars were purchased by the NP for Cement Service in 1967, eventually also used in hauling Bentonite and Silica Sand. The cars hauling Bentonite and Sand could be found all over the US.
IMRC 40’ PS1 Boxcar Kit, painted with Scalecoat II B&M Blue and Black Paints. These were 1957 purchases that were rebuilt in 1976 lowering the A end ladders and a new simplified paint scheme. Used in general service on the B&M. Below is a picture of the as delivered car. {I did this car over 10 years ago.)
Also some new cars I received recently.
Rapido NYC Flexiflow Covered Hoppers for Cement Service, Cars were 125 Ton and had air assist unloading features.
I have not been to the club for serveral weeks, so I resurrected an old picture of my Athearn DT&I GP38-2’s hauling a coil steel car train on the Strongsville Club Layout.
Rick- Cloudy here too in northern IL with about 2" of fluffy stuff coming down. Great cars as always! Are those rapido cars? Also really like the 1776 DTI unit. I still need to find my SOO and MILW bicentennial units.
This week I found a Genesis GP9 with sound for a steal. Then the long awaited WSOR SD40-2 Dummy my friend custom painted for me. Ive been waiting for this thing for a few months now.
Also was getting stuck or “modelers block” on my river scene. So I ripped it up! Starting fresh and going to add a small lumberyard and service station to add some scenery.
David- We must have posted at the same time! Those loads look great! GOing to really add realism to op sessions I need to make some lumber loadds for my flatcars.
Thanks, Ringo. The loads make the wagons ‘look full’ yet they are only the ‘top layer’ and lift out easily. Make different loads and use the same wagons.
Changing your scenery. Yeah! Been there (many times).
Interesting items today, everyone. I have not been doing much lately but discovered some motors I have neglected, intended for my last Blue Box heavy duty flat car. Just hand painted. I decided to forego tie-downs like chains and opted for lumber restraints plus Grandt Line bolts & nuts. (It was tough to add the nuts below the deck.) [*-)]
Rick: Thank you for starting out my favorite thread, Weekend Photo Fun, for us all. I am a big fan of the BOSTON AND MAINE boxcar you shared this week. The gray centerflow is also great, but the B&M is just too handsome not to be my favorite this week.
David: It looks like you did a great job building those loads. Running loaded open topped cars makes everything a lot more interesting.
Ringo: Tearing something that is blocking progress is good, and something I have done on my own layouts.
Paul: The load on youe Athearn Heavy Duty Flatcar looks great. I recently acquired one of those (finally) and hope to add it to my roster in the coming months.
Nothing new from me this week. Here is an old prop-posed picture from my 30 by 30 photo studio.
David, really liking the loaded wagons. I have a soft spot for the English railways and operations for sure.
I finished my week and started my weekend with finishing the weathering and detailing of this Walthers Gold Line CA-1 caboose. I added grab irons in both brass and styrene wire/rod bent to shape on the sides, on the front of the doors and windows and such, brush painted the tops of the steps, and added a bit of acrylic craft paint wash and Vallejo pigments carbon black for weathering. I had this one for a long time before doing anything with it so I’m happy to have it finished. It does need some metal wheels and maybe center shank Kadee couplers but I have to double check the coupler guage.
Next on the projects list is this Bachmann first run Acela, before they came DCC equipped and were just ‘ready’. I’ve opened the shell and I need to remove some capaciters on the PCB board that may interfere with DCC operation. This one is probably going to get a Soundtraxx tsunami2 for electric locomotives. No one has seemed to have captured the Acela’s hybrid K5LA horn, but I’d rather have something than nothing. I should be able to squeeze a speaker or two into that top cavity. The Sountraxx electric loco decoder has some cool features like an ‘arc’ that you can program if you wire up an LED at the pantograph that is in time with a sound indicating arcing. I might try that with a micro LED!
And lastly, today I fired up a 90s redbox Rivarossi Big Boy that I poorly installed DCC into last year with a TCS Wowsound decoder. My wiring was terrible - instead of heat shrink I used electrical tape, also the articulated chuff sound would start clipping the speaker on speed steap 20/128 despite being a low volume, the articulated chuff was just doing something causing it to c
Rick, thanks for the good start to the weekend. I really like the covered Flexi Flo hopper cars.
David, another great scene from your layout. The wagon loads look good.
Ringo, it sounds like you’ll be busy for a while with the new work. I’m afraid that if I had a set of weights, the most exercise I’d get would be placing them on the layout until the glue sets.
Paul, that’s a nice looking flatcar load.
Kevin, your photography is really something. I like how the background is lighter and looks like it really is farther away.
Micktropolis, that’s a nice looking caboose, especially since it’s UP. I don’t have a single caboose yet on my layout. That and some hopper cars are my next purchases.
I haven’t worked on the layout, but we had some out-of-town visitors this week, which was a good excuse to run the trains for a while. I love my City of Los Angeles train. This is a Kato n scale set being pulled by A & B units.
David- Thank you for the kind words! I’ve been here too, lets hope this one actually gets done!
Paul- Nice loads! What are the motors used for? And are the nuts and bolts real?
Kevin- I love that big 4-8-4. You do such a great job on fantasy paint schemes. I really like the tender.
Micktropolis- Best of luck on the acela! The UP caboose looks great.
John- I don’t use them either! Theyre my girlfriends. She does use them a lot so I got a dirty look as I set them up there! Nice looking train. I hope to have a big set like that when I have a big layout
Those are pretty large motors for that basic shape. I note that this company sells motors up to 30,000 HP (saw another at 100,000 HP), which would make these look a bit puny I expect. I worked at a world-scale ethylene plant that had a cooling water system that handled 100,000 gpm, using rather large electric and steam driven pumps.
The bolt ends with nuts are Grandt Line HO #5123 (HO). They are tiny plastic bolt ends (0.02" diameter) with washer/nut. Just paint, snip off, make a tiny hole and glue in the bolt nub. I had used them on my tunnel portals as a small detail. It seems one fell off; hope the portal doesn’t collapse. I see that Tichy makes some similar details.
I worked for Aramco in Saudi Arabia. In their gas-oil separator plants (GOSP), they had gas compressors with electric motors in the 12,000 to 15,000 HP size range.
Great stuff this weekend everyone. I don’t have the time or energy to write something out for everyone, but I did look at all the posts and they look great!
The complete version of what’s below can be found here.
I started off this week with a couple packages. One was my new Smiley Antenna 5/8 160 mhz Slim Duck, which I’ll review later. The other was from a fellow D&H modeler (hint, not the same person as last time). Inside the box were three freight cars!
The first was an Intermountain D&H 40 foot boxcar. The detail on these Intermountain cars are beyond my level of comprehension.
The second was another Intermountain car, this one a PS-2CD covered hopper. I love the D&H
I actually tried something very fancy with that picture. Thank you for noticing the backdrop effect.
The backdrop image is adhered to a piece of 1/4" MDF with wallpaper paste. It is not attached to the diorama board.
I took a 3/8" drill and chucked a 1/4" allen wrench into it so it would be off-center and vibrate. I took the picture on about a 3 second exposure while the drill was vibrating the backdrop image. That made the backdrop seem out of focus and further away to defeat the large depth of field I had with the small aperature opening.
It is a bit of work to set this up, so I only used it on a few images.
Steven Spielberg did something similar in the battle scenes of Saving Private Ryan.
Excellent work as always guys. I enjoyed everything.
WRGMILW, those new diesels look sharp! I bet they sound excellent too.
Kevin that pic of that S&G 4-8-4 with those background effects is great!
I did a bit of work on a Bowser PRR F30a flatcar, replacing the molded on details and thick stirrups with wire parts. I also replaced the deck with a Laserkit one.
I removed the stock steel plates and replaced with lead. Since the underframe detail cannot be seen from most viewing angles, I removed it. The additional weight made the car go from about 2.2oz to 3.6oz. I have another car to do this work on as well. I got the holes drilled using the Skil electric screw driver with a MicroMark chuck, but it was a bit challenging with the tool not turning the bits perfectly centered.
Next is one of a batch of four Branchline Blueprint 50’ AAR boxcars in the GAEX “Shipper’s Delight” paint schemes. This one hasn’t been finished, I had the glue drying for the weights and will work on adding the final details soon.
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