More Progress With Just Plug Lighting

I'm continuing to retrofit buildings in my main city, Zenith, with Woodland Scenics Light Diffusing Window Film as well as stick-on LEDs. This has included a general refurbishing of the city area, which is over 25 years old. The project has reached the corner of Adams and Wabash on the west side of town. In the center background is a DPM MT Arms Hotel, while in the left foreground is a Walthers White Tower hamburger joint. The White Tower has a cool white LED, while the hotel has warm white. Bukowski Liquor on the right is a Downtown Deco Addams Avenue Part One. It won't get lighting, as there are too few windows in it.

The buildings to the right of the hotel will be up for refurbishment as well in due course.

This paricular area has had several inundations over the years due to broken pipes. It was long overdue for a cleanup and freshening, which is still under way, but it's a start.

Walthers Comet II Commuter Cars

Back in the 1990s, I picked up quite a number of Walthers Comet II commuter cars. The late Frank Cicero had an article in the May 1995 RMC on doing a fairly extensive rebuild for these cars. At the time, I was on an extensive travel schedule for work, and these were good projects to take along and work on in the hotel room in the evening. I did fleets of cars for New Jersey Transit, MBTA, and Metro North.

Rapido just released sets for the same prototypes. While they're extremely well detailed, I'm not inclined to get any after pulling the cars I did in the 1990s out. The problem is that they'd basically go unnoticed in the pretty large fleets I did back then, and especially as fleet cars, they'll do.

Below is an NJT coach.

Here is the cab end of an NJT cab car.

The main problem with these cars is the lack of lighting. I did these well before I discovered DCC and well before manufacturers made either factory-issued coach lighting or easily added lighting kits. Thus a problem here is that although the Walthers cars have metal wheels, they're insulated on one side, so the trucks pick up on only two wheels per side. When I worked on these 25 years ago, I added Walthers soffit bulb kits to several, as I did with this Walthers Amfleet from the same period:

However, these flicker. I need to look into LED strips with capacitors to install better lighting with these cars. Here's a bottom shot of one car with details added per the Frank Cicero RMC article:

And here's the car right side up.

A number of the cars I worked on in the 1990s I haven't fully reassembled. I need to pull these out, inventory them, and make them all layout capable. Below are photos of several otrhers from my fleet:

Since taking this photo, I've blanked out the right hand end window on this car. I need to locate a CDOT decal for that space.

This one has the right hand end window blanked, but the chassis still needs paint, couplers, and trucks, and of course it needs interior lights.

This is the same cab car in the closeup above, but before I added the car number and number board decals.

Atlas Cotton Belt RSD-5s

I've always liked the Atlas Cotton Belt RSD-5s. SP's versions were heavily modified,and the only good models are in brass. Cotton Belt's, although they carried the black widow paint, are much more factory stock. I had two problems with getting Atlas models. The first is that the original Yellowbox Kato versions have always been hard to find, and I found one only very recently.

The second is that the reissued Atlas Classic version came out in a year when the Atlas RS-3 frames had zinc pest. First they swelled, pushing the couplers and end platforms up, and then they disintegrated. I got a number of RS-3s and RSD-5s that year, and they all had this happen -- well after the warranty expired, of course. My attitude toward Atlas has soured over the years.

Nevertheless, it was, and still is, possible to order replacement frames from Atlas at a pretty reasonable price, and then it's an intermediate-level project to disassemble the loco, clean off the bits of disintegrated frame, and reassemble the whole thing like new. I've done this on most of the locos I have with the zinc pest.

I started this several years ago on my Classic Cotton Belt RSD-5, but I got sidetracked when I somehow mislaid one of the weights during the disassembly-cleaning process. I finally got around to ordering a replacement and finished the basic reassembly. It's now ready for a Digitrax DH165A0 decoder and LEDs.

The zinc pest left the shell and walkway in some disarray, which I will need to repair. But it's finally on its way!

Much more recently, I found a Yellowbox Kato loco on eBay. It was at a low price with no bids and only hours left on the auction. I snapped it up!

It's missing an end handrail, but this should be easy to find on eBay. A positive is that the wheels show it's never been run at all. The original owner weathered it and put the engineer in the cab.

Scenery Work

Thanks to a gift card, I'm almost finished with a scenery project that's developed by fits and starts for about six years, a big geologic feature that extends above eye level and covers a support column, some electrical conduit, and some sewer pipes that my layout dodges at the high and low points of the main line. The low point is CP Drains, named for Drains on John Allen's G&D, which was the low point on that layout. The high point is behind the rockwork in the Moffat Tunnel.

Most of the rockwork visible is Woodland Scenics Ready Rock. In the past, I've cast and colored my own rockwork from flexible molds, but more recently I've found Ready Rocks, if more expensive, still cost effective in terms of time and effort. I attach them to plaster cloth hardshell using whatever method works, spackle, Sculptamold, silicone caulk, or Woodland Scenics Scenic Cement.

I plan to finish the scene with talus and other touchup work and fill gaps with some smaller-size Ready Rocks, plus Woodland Scenics Clump Foliage.

Below are a few earlier progress shots of this area.