Walthers Proto SP GP9

I've really been playing catch-up lately on recent runs of Walthers Proto GP9s.

All Midwest Model Railroad had left were DCC-ready units, but they installed LokSound 5 in this one and simply charged the factory price for a regular sound-and-DCC unit, and now that it's tested, everything's good. The loco is numbered in the 3300 seriees of GP(Es, which would cover the period from 1970 to 1990.

All other info is the same as the other Proto GP9s that I've recently discussed.

Re-Scrambling Some Background Flats

The background flats behind my Manhattan Transfer yard have been scrambled over and over. Here they were in November, 2011:

When King Mill went out of business, I got a lot of items from their closeout sale, and they replaced a lot of what was in that photo. But now, I'm looking at adding some Downtown Deco plaster flats to the mix:

I'm sure there will be a lot of tweaking and fitting.

Any Amtrak Trip Can Go South At Any Time

I'm starting to think it's become railfan conventional wisdom that even if you think you're having a good trip on Amtrak, it can go south in a big way at any time. Via Trains.com, over the July 4 weekend,

Heat-related delays already had the Chicago-bound Floridian five hours late when it reached Washington on July 4 during severe weather that caused cancellation of that evening’s holiday events. But after arriving at 8:30 p.m., the train didn’t depart Washington until 9:45 a.m. on July 5, nearly 18 hours late. It arrived in Chicago at 4:14 a.m. on Monday, July 6, some 19 hours, 29 minutes late.

The westbound equipment is supposed to flip back east the same day, but with no trainset available, the Sunday departure for Florida was canceled, as was Monday’s departure from Miami. Equipment availability should be back to normal for the Chicago departure today (Tuesday, July 7).

Meanwhile, the southbound Floridian that left Washington two hours late on Sunday departed Jacksonville, Fla., more than eight hours late on Monday after a three-hour delay there. It also encountered heat restrictions and freight train interference, according to Amtrak alerts. It was due to arrive in Miami at 2:44 a.m. today, more than 8½ hours late.

Another Florida-bound train, the Silver Meteor, was stuck at Washington Union Station from 7:03 p.m. Sunday until 4:47 a.m. Monday, waiting for operational locomotives. It lost another hour at Florence, S.C., because of a CSX signal outage. The train was almost 12 hours late leaving Jesup, Ga., on Monday evening and was projected to reach Miami at 5:58 a.m. today, not quite 11 hours late.

I notice that the popular YouTube channel Grounded Life Travel, which used to hype Amtrak sleepers extensivley, hasn't featured Amtrak for over a year, and not long before they dropped the Amtrak hype entirely, they posted this:

Riding long-distance trains on Amtrak is likely to be a retirement activity for most people, especially since you can't rely on scheduled arrival and departure times if you have to be back at work the day after you get back. Beyond that, there's definitely a non-trivial chance that the heat or A/C will go out, or you can simply be put off the train in the middle of nowhere for any number of reasons. Here's another reality check:

Originally, I looked forward t riding Amtrak a lot more during my retirement, but the experiences turned out to be more stressful, not least due to boisterous fellow passengers, than they were worth.

The Kalmbach Legacy Magazines At Firecrown Are Circling The Drain

I saw a post on Facebook:

Rumor is that Firecrown is not doing well with their acquisition of Kalmbach and may be taking all their magazines out of print and may only offer digital editions.

A commenter added,

Firecrown's business model has not been supportive of the hobby shops who sell the magazines in store. Firecrown no longer gives credit for unsold issues, and have made it more difficult for hobby shops to get even what they think they can sell. It looks as if they do not have the organizational ability to resolve the problems they have created. I feel especially sad for the MR (and Trains) staff, who are skilled and accomplished modelers.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Have the magazines Kalmbach sold to Firecrown been performing well?" It answered,

The former Kalmbach Media magazines sold to Firecrown Media—such as Trains, Model Railroader, and Astronomy—have faced significant financial and operational difficulties since the May 2024 acquisition. Despite Firecrown's initial plans to modernize the legacy publications, the portfolio has struggled heavily with digital integration, subscriber churn, and print sustainability.

Key Performance Indicators & Community Reports Severe Technical Disruptions:

Subscribers have documented prolonged outages on the Trains.com ecosystem, including broken digital magazine downloads, non-functional password resets, and completely unresponsive customer service channels.

Print Distribution Concerns:

Rumors and community discussions indicate that Firecrown is struggling with the financial viability of print. Hobbyists report widespread shipping delays and missed issues, with heavy speculation that Firecrown may cancel print entirely and transition exclusively to digital editions.

Retailer Drops:

Brick-and-mortar hobby shops and independent distributors have begun actively dropping Firecrown-owned titles from their shelves, citing changing product focus and supply issues.

Content and Format Degradation:

Longtime readers note that flagship publications like Model Railroader have continued to shrink in size—dropping to a fraction of their historical page counts—while featuring less advanced technical content.

Staffing Transitions:

While Firecrown initially aimed to keep operations in Wisconsin, community updates show that much of the veteran editorial staff has cleared off the mastheads. This turnover has disrupted the community goodwill that Kalmbach spent 90 years building.

Regarding MR itself:

The situation surrounding Model Railroader (MR) under Firecrown Media's ownership has grown increasingly critical, with many long-time hobbyists and industry observers questioning the magazine's long-term survival.

Recent Major Developments

The Return to a Monthly Schedule:

After a highly controversial attempt to slash production costs by moving to a bi-monthly (6 issues per year) print frequency, Firecrown faced intense reader backlash and officially reverted back to a monthly schedule.

The "Thinning" Project:

To offset the costs of printing monthly, the physical magazine has drastically shrunk. Modern issues frequently hover around just 50 to 60 pages, which is less than half the size of the magazine during its peak decades.

Editorial Shifts:

Veteran editor-in-chief Kevin P. Keefe and other long-time staffers are no longer steering the publication. The newer editorial direction relies heavily on basic, beginner-friendly content and recycled layout techniques, causing advanced modelers to look elsewhere for deep technical articles.

Loss of the Historical Archive: One of the biggest blows to subscribers was the degradation of the Model Railroader Digital Archive (the 90-year back-issue database). The transition from Kalmbach's infrastructure to Firecrown's new digital platform resulted in broken links, low-resolution rendering, and a clunky interface that remains a major source of subscriber complaints on the Trains.com forums.

I get the impression that before they sold the magazines to Firecrown, Kalmbach must have taken a very thorough look at their business and decided there was no way they could continue it as it had been running. They had a bloated staff, a huge bulding containing non-productive features like a print library, old project layouts, a model railroad museum, a large employee club layout, and so forth. I actually wonder if a lot of staff time was taken up in showing visitors around the place, as well as moderating the on line forums.

I got fed up with MR during the mid-to-late Kalmbach era, when I realized I wasn't getting the monthly output on MR Video Plus that they promised, plus they were giving away videos that reguiar subscribers had paid for, but not giving subscribers any sort of credit for giving the paid content away for free. It was a little bit cold turkey to give that up, but I've never regretted it. I also gave up RMC when Carstens didn't pay his printers. I'd already had Carstens try to stiff me for $200 they said they'd pay me for an article they ran.

With Facebook in particular, it's easy to interact with the other authors, you don't need to wait a month for new stuff, and you don't have editors controlling the content. The print mags are simply no loss. It looks like Kalmbach had already figured that out.

Home Shops Split Rock Mining Ore Car

The Split Rock Mining Company, built by Thomas Gasior, is one of my all-time favorite layouts. It's very active on Facebook, and just the other day I got a notification that I'm a "top fan", I guess for the number of "likes" I've given it over the years. It has a web page here. Home Shops LLC does custom runs of rolling stock painted for well-known home layouts, and I got a Fox Valley/Scaletrains ore car painted and lettered for Split Rock Mining.

I got mine from Denver Model Trains. There isn't much "prototype" info on theae cars from either the Denver Model Trains site or the Split Rock Mining Facebook page, but from what I can gather, regular ore cara on Split Rock Mining are for on line service only. since they don't have data for interchange.

(I got this photo off Facebook, and I'm assuming it's by Mr Gasior.) So I'm assuming the Home Shops cars, since they have ACI labels, reporting marks, and data, are for interchange, since they'll be running on other layouts. This probably makes them likely to operate in "all rail" trains from the Minnesota ore fields to steel mills elsewhere in the country. As it happens, I relettered a few of the old AHM ore cars that have a B&LE prototype, but the C&NW bought a number of them for "all rail" ore service. They were variously patched and repainted and operated with other roads' ore cars. I decided to see what the Split Rock car would look like in a string with these.

Well, you can at least see that the B&LE cars are a larger prototype.

Walthers Proto Wabash Passenger GP9

Not long ago, I finally found a Walthers Proto Wabash passenger GP9 with sound and DCC on the web. These came out last year and seem to have disappeared very quickly.

I came to appreciate the Wabash late in my modeling career, primarily via the Emery Gulash Green Frog DVD, but the Norfolk & Western has always been one of my "majors". The Chris Wehman Green Frog DVDs on Norfolk Southern cover the former Wabash route from Detroit to Decatur, IL, which also is very informative on the Wabash. I'm slowly gathering some Wabash models that I can run either in pure sets or in post-merger consists with N&W units.

The features of the model are very similar to the Walthers Proto Penn Central Phase III GP9 that I covered last month. A feature carried over is that the number boards are separately lit with F6. In railroad rule books, the number boards are typically lit only on the control unit in the consist, but it looks like most prototype engineers forget to set this either on or off.

On this model, the oscillating warning light is lit with F5. On the prototype, the whole light housing is motorized to move in a figure-8 pattern. On the model, this is simulated by a slow blinking of the LED. In addition, on a number of roads, the top lens is red and lights only when the brakes go into emergency, sometimes called a "dump light". The bottom lens is clear and is used in normal operation. This is the case with the Wabash prototype, and only the lower clear lens on the warning light is lit. I don't believe the model is set up to operate a red upper lens, as this wouldn't be a normal event on the prototype.

The ESU sound decoder with the Proto version has the LokSound 5 prime mover delay at start feature. This means that when you throttle up, it takes the loco a fairly long time to begin to move, reproducing the prototype spool-up time. Setting CV 124=16 will turn this off; CV124=20 will put it back. As a longtime DC operator, I've never gotten used to features like this. I also set CVs 3 and 4, acceleration and deceleration momentum, to 0. These features are maybe more suited to large club-type layouts, but each to his own!

The horn comes from the factory with the single-trumpet "blat" sound.

LaBelle Kit With Dry Transfers

Not long ago, I discovered a car I hadn't unpacked since my last move:

I must have built it closer to 50 years ago than 40. It's a LaBelle wood kit marketed as a 40-foot Illinois Central car, but it's basically a "generic" 40-foot truss rod box. I used dry transfers that I recall were intended to apply to this LaBelle car, but I don't recall who made them. I think I probably did other cars like this, but have never found them.

I see that at the time, I was using Kadee 711 "old time" style couplers. These are intact only because they sat in the box for decades. The others I used have long since disintegrated, these are very brittle.