Holiday Mail And Express

John R frequently posts about mail and express trains on his layout and his favorite prototypes. I like them, too. Some of my earlier serious railfan memories involve the Erie Lackawanna in New Jersey, which emphasized mail and express business after the merger. On one hand, I was sorry to see the old Lackawanna gray and maroon passenger trains sullied with dirty mail and express cars, but on the other hand, their grittiness was appealing.

Then my family moved to suburban Washington, DC, and there was even more mail and express on the PRR, not to mention the B&O and RF&P. I keep wanting to add regular mail and express to my layout operation, but so far, other interests have led to procrastination. But here is some equipment pre-positioned for this -- I have a regular switch job at my main passenger terminal that moves mail and express from the freight yard to the passenger platforms:

In earlier years, one of the easiest mail and express cars to model was the Santa Fe Fe-24, which is the prototype for the Athearn bluebox double-door 50-foot boxcar. The narrow panels to the right of the doors were unique to this class. Here are a few I've collected, some factory painted, some slightly modified and done with decals:

These had lots of variations in trucks, details, paint, and lettering. They ran all over the country. In fact, they had a regular assignment carrying Time magazine over the EL and Santa Fe from New York to Los Angeles.

Wait -- There Really Is a Gage Restraint Measurement Vehicle!

In my post from December 24, I speculated that the Gage Restraint Measurement Vehicle lettering on my Atlas track cleaner was fantasy. Nope!

Track Cleaning Extra

My layout is in a semi-finished basement, which it shares with a gas powered furnace and clothes dryer. In order to avoid carbon monoxide buildup, there has to be a certain amount of opening to the outdoors. (I worked for a natural gas utility for a while, and there's a formula for calculating this, which I forget.) Anyhow, even though the openings are screened, this means that there's a certain amount of unavoidable dust that's going to come in from outside, as well as dust that will fall from the ceiling, on top of ordinary corrosion of the rail.

So throughout the layout's history, I've experimented with track cleaning cars. One I've tried is the Atlas (video here). This hasn't attracted much enthusiasm on forums (if that's worth noting). I think one problem is that rotary abrasive disks don't actually seem to work very well as track cleaners. So I tried this one out and eventually set it aside -- a little sad, because it costs as much as a diesel. One thing I did was body mount the couplers, a big improvement.

The other day I decided to pull it out again. I had a defective DCC decoder on hand that would control the motor but not the lights. But this didn't have lights anyhow, so I mounted the otherwise useless decoder in the track cleaner's 8-pin factory DCC plug. This meant I could run it on high no matter what the loco that pulled it was doing. Looking at the Atlas video, I remembered it had a vacuum cleaner attachment. Although the rotary abrasive pads didn't work, I decided to try the vacuum cleaner again. Hmm, it works!

The version I got is lettered for the US Department of Transportation as a "Gage Restraint Measurement Vehicle", which was probably developed from the Mark VI Frammis.

I love it! But in the Atlas video, I noted the dust it picked up after just one trip around the demonstration layout. Here's my result after running over maybe 40 feet of my main line:

I now think this will have a permanent place in a track cleaning extra. Glad to get some use out of it after some years! It doesn't polish the railheads, but it picks up loose ballast, dust, bits of foam, and general debris.

The best track cleaner ever, at least that I've found, is the old Revell from the 1950s. I stripped mine and lettered it for the Santa Fe:

Vehicles

Here's a fun one from a supplier called Oxford Commercials. My wife found it on a side trip we took to Des Plaines Hobbies while visiting relatives in Chicago, and she gave it to me as an anniversary present:

Oxford Commercials is a UK die cast supplier. This is advertised as 1:76 and is presumably UK prototype, but there are lots of Indian-heritage people in California, and this isn't really out of place on a US layout.

Here's a Boley crew cab dump truck. I painted the dump body red, which matches most CN prototype trucks I've seen photos of. Then I added MG decals for CN vehicles:

With CN's expansion into the US by merging with Wisconsin Central, DM&IR, EJ&E, and Illinois Central, CN prototype is a little less regional or specialized. Here's a CN pickup I shot from the Amtrak City of New Orleans in deepest Mississippi:

Here's a Boley tree trimmer that I put CSX door decals on from decals made by an eBay seller. The conspicuity stripes came from the MG Decals CN truck set I used on the dump truck:

Since Walthers took over Boley and put its vehicles in their Cornerstone line, I think they may be missing a bet by not releasing them with railroad lettering.

A Couple Of Fun Purchases

I found a couple of good cars on sale at Walthers -- neither is in the swap meet category at just a couple of bucks, but in their favor, they have metal wheels and Kadee clone metal couplers, plus good contemporary paint schemes. With post-2005 conspicuity stripes, they match my current renewed interest in the prototype.

I've seen on DVDs that since former Conrail cars were lettered for NYC in the CSX split, this wasn't just a temporary move, and a lot of NYC lettered cars have received full CSX paint while keeping the NYC reporting marks. Thanks, Walthers! I lived in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC from 1963 to 1968 and really enjoyed railfanning CSX predecessors. Most of that time I was in college, so I associate the region with the holidays, and this car is special for that, too.

Walthers also did this car for BNSF. Again, the yellow conspicuity stripes are a great feature!

Most of these cars on BNSF are red,

But a very few are black like the Walthers.

Scenery Rework -- V

Yesterday I finished the plaster cloth hardshell in the project area. Here's an overall view as it stands:

Here's a closer view of some finished rockwork (I think almost 20 years old, some of the first scenery I put in) with the new hardshell above it:

This specific area is CP Drains, named after the station Drains, the lowest point on John Allen's G&D. Drains is also the lowest point on my layout.

Tomorrow I need to vacuum and otherwise clean up all the plaster dust and other crud! The hardshell will mostly be covered with rock castings of some sort, probably from several sources. I won't do much of this until after the holidays. Here's a photo I posted on a forum with posed WM-B&O Fs at the tunnel portal:

After watching my Green Frog CSX DVD set, I'm thinking hard about making the tunnel portal area and rockwork in the lower half of the project reflect Appalachian landscape, transitioning to more Rocky Mountain style scenery in the upper half. The differences will mainly be in vegetation, since watching the CSX DVDs convinces me that there's a great deal of more or less vertical rockwork in the East as well as the West. Naturally the "experts" will tell me I'm doing it all wrong once again, but I've learned it's never fun to have them visit anyhow, so they won't.

Scenery Rework -- IV

I picked up a Woodland Scenics triple roll of plaster cloth and am working my way through it -- this project will probably take up the whole roll. Here's the status of the hardshell as of today:

This is the other side of the mountain here. I'm still tweaking and pulling the cardboard lattice.

As I've said earlier, I make a little progress and then look at what the shape of things is telling me. This project will wind up connecting two areas of scenery that were already more or less finished, so it's a worthwhile bit of progress.

The tunnel portal is starting to tell me it's something C&O or N&W, which is fine, since the Virginian-coal mine area is just on the other side to the left. We'll see what develops!

Scenery Rework -- III

I'm discovering again what a good scenery technique cardboard mesh and hardshell is. It's cheap (almost "free" for the cardboard strips) and easy to make changes. I shape out an area and let it sink in for hours or days. I watch a few train DVDs with scenery -- the Green Frog Emery Gulash Rio Grande Odyssey series is good for this, among others. Thinking about what was unfinished, what could be done, and where the various pipes and ducts are, I'm expanding the project a little more with each step. Here's the current state of the work:

There's another, smaller object I wanted to accomplish when I started this project. Two things you see very often when you're out railfanning in 2015 is railroad construction equipment and maintenance vehicles. I dug out a Roco road grader from the 1960s or 70s from my stored stuff. This reminded me of a Union Pacific grader I saw at Caliente:

I painted up the Roco model. There's an eBay seller who does decals for railroad maintenance equipment, and I'll eventually letter the grader for UP like the prototype. As part of the project, I leveled out an area and added BLMA K-rail barriers.

Scenery Rework -- II

Actually, the MR Virginian project layout is by no means the first MR project layout that's inspired me. I've been inspired pretty frequently by other MR project layouts. I've done a lot of real-world railfanning in recent months, and then I saw the video for the new MR Eagle Mountain project layout, which gave me a lot of food for thought.

Here's a still shot from the MR site. Although I never made it to Eagle Mountain or Ferrum as a railfan (a little too much Indiana Jones to that trip), the landforms on the project layout are a lot like what I see on Cajon or Tehachapi. The scenic treatment, steep slopes forming vignette scenes, is something I've already used, as well as the cardboard-lattice-and-plaster-cloth technique. On top of that, scenery slopes simply increase the surface area of the layout -- not an illusion, just a fact. I won't have desert scenery, although I may try less-green areas in the lower levels inspired by the Powder River area in Wyoming-Nebraska. (I got a couple of videos on Powder River and Crawford Hill as part of my renewed BNSF interest lately.)

So, inspired at least some by the Eagle Mountain project railroad, I started new cardboard lattice.

I had most of a roll of plaster cloth on hand, and I applied as much as I could:

Here's how the cleanout fits in. I won't cover it up, and I hope if it needs to be used at any point, I can remove layout items from around it and possibly cover the layout area with plastic sheet:

Next I'll add more webbing and fill in a few areas with the little bit of Celluclay I have on hand. Then next week I'll get more plaster cloth, Sculptamold/Celluclay, and craft paint.

Scenery Rework And Additions

One of the most challenging areas of scenery on my layout is surrounding a sewer pipe and cleanout. This is also the highest point on the layout for the upper track, and the scenery overall in this area has been patterened after the D&RGW . Here's the area behind the sewer pipe soon after basic benchwork and track were installed c 1995:

The area just past the sewer pipe in the photo above wound up being conceptualized and slowly scenicked based on the East Portal of Moffat Tunnel, thanks to a Mr Plaster Moffat Tunnel portal I found at a hobby shop. This is how East Portal looked after I did some work in the area in December 2014:

I was never satisfied with the lower-tier scenery below East Portal and the sewer pipe, as well as realizing there was never going to be a good solution for the sewer cleanout -- it was always going to be there and always going to need some sort of access for plumbing emergencies.

Around the time I began to focus seriously on the area below and to the left of the sewer pipe, MR came out with its Virginian project layout. The Virginian has been one of my favorites since I was maybe 12 years old and eagerly devoured the new H. Reid book my parents gave me for my birthday.

Eventually I added a Walthers Cornerstone New River mine to this area. You can still see the sewer cleanout poking behind it:

But the area behind the mine continued to be problematic. There were numerous false starts, none good enough for me to make much progress.

Last week I started to hack away and rethink.

For reference, you can see the back of the mine and the sewer pipe. More to come.

Frustrations

For whatever reason, my interest in the hobby, never very faint, has been rekindled even more lately. Maybe it's because gas is cheaper, maybe because I'm a little healthier, but I've been going out and railfanning a lot, and I'm seeing changes that have caught my interest more than since the 1960s, when I eagerly followed mergers, the diesel horsepower race, removal of roofwalks, and ACI labels.

Here's just one example of what I'm seeing that I'm aiming at more in my basement:

Just yesterday, the day before Thanksgiving, I was hitting my favorite spots, and it was just one train after another, sometimes two or three at once, whether it was UP or BNSF. Right after lunch I caught this meet of a BNSF intermodal with a manifest just south of the old Cajon station.

The intermodal is stopped, so the crew is down off the loco and doing a defect inspection. The cottonwoods along Cajon Creek are at their fall peak. But I'm seeing things that few modelers seem to pay much attention to.

• Of eight visible units, all superficially alike, there are three models, 9-44CW, ES44DC, and ES44ACC4. There are two different paint schemes.
• However, a more subtle difference is the antenna domes on the cab roofs. Positive Train Control (PTC) is being implemented, which requires new electronics and antennas on road locomotives. In other words, there are detail differences, new ones.

On the UP, the new antennas are pretty much out there for everyone to see:

On BNSF, it's less clear -- they seem to be hidden under domes:

Note that these are in addition to the single white antenna dome that's been on locos for the past 15 years or so. Here's the older type:

This by itself is pretty standard on recent HO models, but the additional PTC hoods aren't. But on BNSF, there seem to be variations on the extra white PTC hoods, and beyond that, BNSF seems to have gone to a different design on recent locos. Here's a pretty new ES44C4:

This design is carried over onto the new Tier 4 locos:

I haven't gotten a good down-on shot of these yet. However, a Shapeways seller has put out a part for this.

The model press (such as is left of it), the blogs, the forums, haven't touched this stuff. I put up a query on the Model Railroader forum; so far, nobody's answered. In one of John Armstrong's books, he was taking about designing a club layout and imagined a child looking at the finished layout and asking, "Daddy, why don't those men look like they're having fun?"

Armstrong was a perceptive guy.

My Favorite Trainfest Announcement

There were lots of good announcements from Trainfest in Milwaukee last weekend, reported at Model Railroader. The one that really turned my crank, though, was Accurail's announcement of 36-foot boxcar prototypes from the first few decades of the 20th century.

I'm not committed to any particular era or prototype, but I've always enjoyed the shorter and earlier equipment, especially in connection with small steam and short lines. Accurail has always done a good job on earlier prototypes. Here are some that are on my layout:

I notice that Accurail older prototypes like these turn up frequently on Model Railroader HO project layouts, like the current Winston Salem Southbound Tar Branch. With a little weathering and paint on trucks and underframes, they work very well. A couple of photos above show how well they also work with recent Bachmann locos of the same era.

In the past, 36-foot steel underframe boxcars were available in urethane. I assembled a number of these, although more recently I'm less willing to undertake all that effort. Here are two that were available in the 1990s from the Renssellaer club's store:

I always eagerly await each new Accurail release.

BNSF Is Growing On Me

I moved out to Los Angeles in 1968 and started railfanning the Santa Fe right away. Amtrak came along and the first yellowbonnets turned up:

In the background you can see the work equipment involved in the 1970s relocation of Sullivan's Curve.

Then things really got interesting, first, with the abortive SP-SF merger and the Kodachrome paint scheme:

Not to mention all the new and rebuilt power. Then we got the return of the warbonnets:

But I don't know what it was after that -- maybe the worn-out patch paint jobs after 1995 got too depressing:

For a while I kept telling myself that all the look-alike orange GEs were too boring:

But lately something's changed.

There are lots of little differences even among the GEs, and somehow the light catches them a little differently all day. Looks like I'm a fan!