Bachmann Silver Series 4-Wheel Caboose

I really like the Bachmann Silver Series 4-wheel caboose, which is a somewhat retooled version of a model that's probably been in their line from the start. I have more of them than I should:

Not long ago, I found another one on eBay. It was bright red with an incongruous New Haven McGinnis "NH", but it was cheap. I discovered that if I just brushed the lettering with some Walthers Solvaset, the letters simply floated off. With that problem solved, I masked off the black of the roof and cupola and sprayed the car boxcar red. Then I applied decals from the K4 NYO&W loco and caboose decal set.

Here's a prototype photo off the web:

Close enough.

Vintage eBay Find

A fun sub-hobby I enjoy is occasionally finding vintage items that can be restored to operate compatibly with contemporary equipment. This usually involves replacing trucks and couplers, but it may also involve adding weight and sometimes cosmetic improvements. Not long ago I found a Chateau Martin wine car on eBay that I'm pretty sure is a Laconia kit from the 1950s.

This is exactly how I got it from the seller (it was pretty cheap). A prior owner had converted it to Kadees mounted with wood screws, so that's one thing I don't need to worry about, but the trucks will have to go, and the roof probably needs sanding sealer and new paint.

The prototype is a General American Pfaudler milk tank car (the tanks are internal within the wood carbody), the same thing as the much more recent Athearn car. Chateau Martin used it for wine. For some reason, as far as I can tell, Athearn never brought its model out in the Chateau Martin scheme. A web search shows Lionel brought one out in 3-rail O, AHM did an HO freight reefer in this scheme in the 1950s, and Roundhouse did a 50-foot HO express reefer in this scheme, but neither is as close to the prototype as this 60-year-old Laconia car.

Tony Thompson's blog has a post on this same Laconia car. He pretty much agrees it's an OK model as is, and nothing better has come along.

There's also a history of Chateau Martin and the wine cars at this site. They ran from 1940 to about 1974 in the basic magenta paint wirh several different lettering schemes. The traffic was between Waterford, CA and Bronx, NY, where they were unloaded at a Chateau Martin bottling plant, but they somehow seem to have appeared in freights all over the country.

Progress On Fat Lou's

I've finished the detail painting and weathering on the Downtown Deco Fat Lou's Liquor and have also added the wall signs.

I decided to position it with the front facing the front edge of the shelf. But as you can see, while I've figured out exactly where it should go, I still have to level things out and clear the surrounding area up.

The detail painting and signage went much easier than I expected. The basic model should be complete within the next few days. The signs in the kit are Downtown Deco's older style, not actual decals, but printed on thin glossy paper. I cut them out and mounted them on blobs of full-strength Elmer's glue the general size of the sign itself. I squished the signs into the glue and straightened them out, then left things to dry. The glue shrank and pulled the paper signs into the brickwork pretty well. If glue seeped out from the edges of the signs, that was OK, it was invisible when it dried.

Opening Up A New Photo Angle

I decided to begin opening up a new photo angle to a corner of the Manhattan Transfer section of my layout, which I've bern neglecting from the start. I want to add several Downtown Deco kits, starting with the Fat Lou's Liquor, kit DD165. Below is a photo from their web site:

I've gotten as far as assembly of the plaster sides and basic painting:

Most of the work that remains will be in the detail painting and weathering on the walls and adding the signs and roof details. Then several more structures in the bare area to the right, and then other street details and vehicles.

Walthers Mainline Central Vermont GP9

The Central Vermont is oone of the railroads I grew up with, because in my late teens I spent several years near White River Junction, where I saw CV GP9s and Duluth, Winnipeg & Pacfic RS-11s all the time -- even had a chance to ride to St Albans on the Ambassador the year before it was discontinued. Central Vermont models, especially for the later years, have been fairly hard to find. Walthers released a Mainline GP9 in the post-1977 green and yellow not long ago, and while this is after my time railfanning and riding the CV, I'll take what I can get.

The Walthers Mainline brand are bare-bones models and lack many of the details on CV units, includiing sunshades, winterization hatches, rerail frogs, correct horns, bell mounted on the long hood, and spark arresters. Oddly, there is a plow mounted on one pilot, but this is the rear pilot, when the CV units in the late scheme have plows on the front pilot, the long hood end. I'm not sure how easy this will be to change. The shade of green strikes me as just a bit dark, but this is a subjective judgment.

I've added some of these details to GT 4448 above. I covered GT 4448 in a post here four years ago. As I said in that post, the Grand Trunk Railway, which was the US portion of the CN line from Montreal to Portland, ME, was a mountain railroad that did have dynamics on its GP9s.

In addition, CN subsidiary Central Vermont, which was the US portion of a CN line from Montreal to New London, CT, was also a mountain railroad that had dynamics on its freight GP9s. Grand Trunk Railway GP9s 4442-4450 were built for the line to Portland, ME and originally lettered with just the name Grand Trunk, not Grand Trunk Western, on the long hood in the CN green and yellow scheme.

The GT and CV units originally ran interchangeably on both the lines to New London and Portland. However, the GT units, or at least most of them, were eventually sent to the Grand Trunk Western, although parent Canadian National transferred GTW units back to the CV as needed. By the 1970s and 1980s, GTW blue units could be found on the Central Vermont along with their own green and yellow units.

Baseds on the original roster info, CV 4450 would have originally been lettered for the Grand Trunk, but for whatever reason seems to have been transferred to the CV before the other GT units went to the GTW.

As a result, GT 4448 will opeate as a mate with CV 4450 on my layout, something I had planned all along. I'm also hoping to track down the other Walthers CV number in this run, 4447, although these locos seem to have sold out very quickly.

Both these locos are the DCC sound versions. The only change I make to the ESU OEM CVs is to set CVs 3 and 4, acceleration and deceleration, to 0 -- I'm still used to DC control, and I like to see a loco start right away. This is a pure personal preference.

Accurail Lehigh Valley RBL Car

I saw this Accurail white Lehigh Valley bunkerless refrigerator RBL car kit in a train store many years ago and picked it up by reflex, even though I wasn't sure if it had a prototype -- Accurail can get pretty creative. But Lehigh Valley is one of the roads I grew up around in New Jersey, and I'll pretty much go for anything LV. But I looked in equipment registers when I got it home, and I've been a member of the Anthracite Railroads Historical Society from the early days and never found any info.

So it sat in a box for a long time unfinished. As a teenager, I'd seen the LV white outside-ribbed X58 style cars that were made by Athearn and others, but this wasn't those.

Finally I ran into a Facebook post with a prototype photo and some info.

It said the flag in the photo wan't completely painted. The car was one of five numbered 7050-7054 and leased from North American Car. For whatever reason, leased cars didn't always show up in the equipment register. Around the same time, I found the photo below with the ladders shortened as in the kit. The cars were apparently built by Pullman-Standard and had P-S features, but for Accurail, this is close enough.

I don't know the photographer of either photo. I don't know what service they were in. If I were to venture a guess, it might be beer. But I finished the car, and I'm delighted finally to know it has a prototype.

Confirmation!

A mostly unacknowledged problem with DCC, as well as earlier carrier control systems, is that the circuit breakers that come with many standard products, like in my case the NCE Power Cab or SB5 booster, aren't always sensitive enough to catch certain short circuits. This is especially true if a loco comes up to a switch that's set against its direction of travel, meaning that if its pickup wheels cross onto a powered frog with the polarity set opposite the track the loco is on, a short will result -- but the NCE (and possibly other manufacturer) circuit breaker won't activate.

This will heat up the metal pickup wheel involved very quickly and melt any plastic next to it, like an axle sleeve and gear, almost instantly turning the power truck interior into a blob of goo. The only cure is to see if you can get a replacement power truck from the manufacturer, and given the greater complexity of newer models, replacing a power truck with associated wiring isn't a trivial task. I've had to do this with three expensive locos, and finding a solution to the problem has always been at the back of my mind.

Last year I saw a comment on a thread somewhere that said if you connect a Tam Valley DBA002 booster between your DCC system and your layout bus (or multiple DBA002 boosters between the DCC and your power districts), this has a circuit breaker that's fast and sensitive enough to catch this kind of a short. At $59.95, this was inepensive enough, especially considered against the likelihood of more melted power trucks, that I decided to give it a try. I've used a lot of Tam Valley's Frog Juicers, which also operate with fast circuit breakers, so I thought this might actually work.

\ I set it up, and my big question was when I might run into the problem again and see if the DBA002 tripped. A big cause of the problem in my experience is if, via some glitch, a loco starts crawling very slowly toward a switch that's set against it, and I don't see it until it's too late. I would have to wait until this happened again and see if the DBA002 caught it. The question would also be whether the NCE system would ever see it and, if not, how I could troubleshoot the short, if a short it turned out to be.

Finally, the other day, my DCC bus lost power, I couldn't run a loco, even though my control station said power was on, and it had the loco addressed. So I had to go over all my wiring connections and see that they were OK. Then I noticed that the red LED next to the DCC OUT terminals on the DBA002 was blinking. So this was an indication that I had a short, even though my NCE system hadn't picked it up. This was my sign that maybe I needed to check and see if any locos had crept onto a switch that was set against it.

Yes, that had happened. I moved the loco involved back from the frog, and the system reset. The NCE circuit breaker had never noticed. The DBA002 had saved the day!