Modeling Childhood Memories -- II

My post about watching trains while driving to Florida with my family about 1960 got me thinking more about reconstructing those trips. I mentioned US Route 1 and US Route 13, but considering the towns in my memory and the fact that we often paralleled the Atlantic Coast Line makes me think we also must have taken US Route 301.

But there was another trip where we went through Roanoke, VA, which of course was a holy place for railfans. I simply don't know why we went through Roanoke, as it wasn't on a logical direct route from New Jersey to Florida. My father wasn't interested in railroads, and my parents were actually never happy about my interest, which they now and then actively tried to discourage, so it certainly wasn't due to any rail interest on their part. There may have been a business reason for the diversion.

We went through Roanoke about 1961, when I would have been about 13. Steam would have been very recently phased out, but I was less interested in that than in the ex-Virginian electrics, which were still running. I do know we went straight through town, presumably on US Route 220 or 221, and crossed both the N&W and ex Virginian lines at grade. (I could tell the Virginian line because it had catenary over it!) However, I didn't see any electrics, or for that matter any ex-Virginian FM diesels. I did see a consist of four or five black N&W RS-11s running light on the Virginian line, but that was about it. My parents let me jump out and snap a photo of the N&W depot, which I still have someplace, but they had other things to move on with, and that was all the railfanning I ever got to do in Roanoke.

I always liked the N&W, but since it ran east-west and we always drove north-south, I just got glimpses. I still model N&W as one of my "majors". Here's a Life-Like/Proto GP9 that I just installed DCC in today:

This model is about 15 years old. Although it has an 8-pin socket, converting it to DCC is more than minimal work, since the old Proto GPs had a problem with cracked axle gears, so you need to replace these on all four axles to get them to run well at all. You also have to replace the 1.5 volt incandescent bulbs with either 16 volt (my choice) or LEDs with resistors. So the whole job is maybe 2 hours, but the result is pretty nice. Here's the 710's sister, which I did several months ago:

A very early Atlas/Kato RS-11, which i got undecorated and painted and detailed for N&W. I converted it to DCC not long ago.

An Atlas Classic RS-11 in the later post-1964 "hamburger" scheme:

So I'm getting close to being able to run some of the four and five unit diesel consists that I wished I'd seen more of as a kid.

Swap Meet Update

I've made a lot of progress on the treasures I picked up at the swap meet two weeks ago. I tossed the trucks from the Roma Wine tank car, plugged the bolster holes with plastic sprue, built out some coupler mounts from styrene, and drilled both the truck and coupler mounts #50 and tapped 2-56:

Then I added weight, couplers, and trucks with metal wheels and touched up the paint. Here's the finished car:

It now comes in at 3.75 ounces, spot on for NMRA weight. There's a page on this car here. Actually, although the other paint schemes shown aren't prototypical, at least as far as I know, they don't look at all bad. I won't go out of my way to find one, but if one of those pops up at another swap for 50 cents, I'll probably take it!

Here's one of the three Roundhouse gravel cars I picked up:

The pivot posts in the coupler boxes were a little too big for the Kadees to be an easy fit, so I had to do a lot of work reaming both the couplers and the centering springs to get them to work easily -- but they finally did. Over the years I've found footage in various videos of operations in open pit mines, quarries, and so forth that shows industrial cars like these in operation. They mostly seem to be painted gray. I'll need to add numbers and heavy weathering to these down the road as well, but I'm not sure how I'll finally use them, except that I think they're a good match for "critter" diesels and things like the Bachmann 0-6-0Ts.

Modeling Childhood Memories -- I

Sometime around 1957, when I was ten years old, I had several relatives who retired and moved to Florida from New Jersey, where I mostly grew up. As a result, my family would drive down to visit them during winter school vacation. This, of course, was well before I-95; we variously drove straight down US Route 1, US Route 301, or US Route 13, which went down the DelMarVa Peninsula and (at the time) crossed the mouth of Chesapeake Bay on an automobile ferry. (An extra bonus was that the ferry unloaded right next to the Pennsylvania Railroad's own small ferry yard in Little Creek, VA, where you could see an N6b caboose, a Baldwin VO switcher, and a crane with an old L1 tender.)

Since I was too young to drive, I got to look out the window for the whole route, and especially south of Richmond, the highways used to parallel rail lines. I think US 301 mostly followed the Atlantic Coast Line and US 1 followed the Seaboard Air Line, but over the trip and the various routes we took, I got to see a certain amount of Southern and Central of Georgia. At the time the ACL was transitioning from silver-and-purple to black with yellow stripes. My mouth always watered for the Revell EMD switchers (info here) that then were available painted for ACL purple, as well as their "pulpwood cars" lettered for ACL, but never was able to get my hands on any. Just as well, the EMDs were apparently pretty awful.

So I keep my eye out for models painted in the paint schemes I admired in my earliest days railfanning. Here's a Bachmann ACL GP7:

An ACL Alco switcher:

A Seaboard Alco:

For some reason, I have vivid memories of SAL triple hoppers on these trips. Here's an Accurail:

Here's a Bowser:

Modeling Ideas From Emery Gulash

I have a lot of the late Emery Gulash's archival 16mm railfan film on DVD from Green Frog. (Gulash has some material on DVDs from other producers as well, but most is on Green Frog.)

There are lots of features in his film that are inspirational for modelers. They include the fact that he keeps the camera running after the locos go by, so you get good views of the cars in the trains. Also, he frequently shoots from bridges or hillsides, so you get something of a modeler's eye view of trains, which means you get to see the weathering on the tops of the cars.

One thing I've taken away from his films is that by the 1960s, when I started seriously railfanning and the era which inspires a lot of my modeling, the paint had worn off the roofs of many freight cars -- although some roads painted the roofs silver. A few trips through tunnels and it would be hard to tell the difference. I would say that in Gulash films, about half the roofs visible are bare metal (or painted silver). Thus I've followed up and weathered the roofs of many cars, especially the Accurails, which take well to small improvements.

I've noticed that the Model Railroader staff sometimes does this on cars they use on the MR&T or project layouts, but so far, they haven't pointed it out. I think it adds a lot to a fleet with relatively small effort. (I use an airbrush with a mix of silver and light gray to simulate galvanized metsl.)

A Couple Of Roundhouse 50-Foot Boxcars

Inspired by John R's recent post, in my capacity as Manhattan Transfer yardmaster, I sent RI 1227 to pull Track 8 to bring one of mine out for photography:

Here is the car:

DCI 2018 is stenciled for tire service:

I'm pretty sure this one was a post-Athearn takeover, post-China RTR version. Here's an earlier kit version:

I added weathering and a repack stencil from a Microscale data sheet.

A Good Day At The Swap Meet

I had a particular goal in mind when I went to the Simi Valley swap meet this morning: I was hoping to find some Roundhouse gravel cars. I've gotten more interested in the kind of equipment that runs on industrial railroads, hauled around by diesel critters and steam tank locos, and it occurred to me that the Roundhouse gravel cars are just that sort of thing. Ebay prices seemed out of line when I checked. I was inspired especially by one that a Montana modeler, Chet Zaiko, did and posted a photo of here (it's the one lettered for the Logan Valley). Lo and behold, I ran into a guy who had three of them that he was letting go for $2 each.

They have Kadee couplers but missing parts, and I'll need to strip them, repaint them, and weather them heavily.

I have sort of a list in the back of my head of other possible cars I go for if I see them. One is the AHM 6-dome Roma Wine tank car. I found two of these at 50 cents each, one will be fixed up, the other kept for parts.

Here's a photo of the prototype:

It's sorta-kinda. Tony Thompson is pretty hard on it in his blog, but it depends on what you're after. There's a part of me that was, and still is, delighted at some of that 1960s AHM stuff. The car needs better trucks with metal wheels and mounted with screws, frame mount Kadees, weight, and paint touchup, but the alternative is the $250-plus Precision Scale brass car, which I just don't see the point of.

Accurail vs New Walthers AAR Boxcars

While I have lots of other brands on my layout, my 40-foot AAR boxcar of choice since they came out more than 20 years ago has been the Accurail plastic kit. This has been upgraded over the years, but I've always liked its basic features -- pretty much the best paint job going, readily available, and low cost. Weight as built from the box is up to the NMRA recommended value of 3.75 ounces, which works for me, and which I try to follow.

It also has features that are good for an operating layout -- separate grabs and ladders tend to get damaged in ordinary handling, so the cast-on features are great, and the cars photograph well.

They do need Kadee couplers and metal wheels. So let's figure typical cost as of summer 2015: 40-foot Accurail boxcar on sale at MB Klein: $12.79. 4 Kadee wheelsets, roughly $3.00. 1 pair Kadee 158s, roughly $2.25. Total, about $18.00.

Walthers lately came out with a 1944 AAR 40-foot boxcar with very similar features to the Accurail, good paint though still not quite up to Accurail's, cast on grabs and ladders (good features for operators), cast plastic steps slightly better than Accurail. It has metal magnetic couplers and metal wheels. Price at MB Klein $18.79, so it's roughly comparable. Its weight is a little over 3 ounces, so it needs more to come up to NMRA recommended weight.

Here's a recent-run Accurail car:

Just for fun, here's a shot of the underframe, with Accurail's fairly recent brake rod detail upgrade:

Here's a Walthers 1944 AAR car:

Here's the Walthers car underframe:

The roof of the Walthers car snaps out. I added a self-adhesive half-ounce weight to bring the car up to NMRA recommended value (except that the self-adhesive weights eventually come undone, so I stuck it on with some caulk):

In both cases I painted the trucks to match the body color; for the Accurail, I also painted the underframe.

Return Of The Texas South East Railroad

A talented East Texas modeler named Len Turner used to post about his model railroad on the now-gone Whistle Post forum, as well as on Big Blue (which I've given up on for various reasons). But several years ago, he moved and dismantled his railroad. I used to revisit his old blog now and then just to look at the pictures of his models, which were (and are) mostly Accurail and Bachmann, very creatively posed and photographed. But then he deleted the blog and some Youtube videos he made, a loss!

Last month he started a new blog, saying he missed the hobby and is building a new, although smaller, layout. He's put some of his photos back up, too. I e-mailed him, happy he's back but a little sad that the steam on his old layout is gone. He says maybe that will be back, too.

Terrible -- III

Spur mostly ballasted with a couple of boxcars on spot. Behind them is evidence of further work on the tailings pile:

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