The Bachmann Spectrum 0-6-0T

The Bachmann Spectrum saddle tank 0-6-0T dates from a very early Bachmann model that was available from 1972 to 1978. A 1975 catalog page can be found here. The prices in the 1970s ranged from $12 to $16. At the time, I had just moved out on my own and was building a shelf layout in a walk-in closet. I was interested in a small layout along the lines of the Gum Stump & Snowshoe and was focusing on equipment from about 1900-1920, because it was compact and interesting.

I saw the Bachmann saddle tanker when it came out, and I got one, probably for $12, fully aware of what to expect from Bachmann at the time, but willing to take a chance given my interests. Unfortunately, the chassis disintegrated from Zinkpest as soon as I got it out of the box. For $12, I wasn't upset; the body was good anyhow, and I kept it around.

Sometime in the late 1990s, Bachmann brought the 0-6-0T saddle tank back as a Spectrum model, with pretty much the same body over a state-of-the-art chassis. I was delighted. I found one for something like $40 at discount. The early version had no DCC, but it did have solder points on the PC board for a decoder. Not long ago, I dug mine out and installed DCC:

I followed the DCC install instructions here. It looks like there were several runs of this model in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and later ones have DCC as a factory item. They seem to be discontinued by Bachmann but can still be found on eBay or as new old stock elsewhere.

I was especially interested in the model, both in the 1970s and 1990s, becauks it is based on a J Harold Geissel drawing in the May 1958 MR. It was portrayed as belonging to the Leetonia & Cherry Valley Railroad. At the time, this seemed to me a fanciful name for a rural type operation.

In the 1970s, there were far fewer opportunities to research obscure shortlines. When I checked back on the May 1958 MR at the MR Digital Archive, I saw that it gave enough information on the Leetonia & Cherry Valley to show it was a real railroad. I noted, though, that the low cab made me think it might be a steel mill locomotive. But in 1958 or 1975, we didn't have Google. (The only options at those times would be to find a really good library with collections of Poor's Manual of Railroads, ICC reports, or, a real longshot, Official Railway Equipment Registers -- but you'd be spending a lot of time going through them no matter what.)

It turns out that the Leetonia & Cherry Valley was a property incorporated in January 1910 to take over the railroad of the United Iron & Steel Company in Leetonia, Ohio, near Youngstown. At that time, the line consisted of 4 1/2 miles of yard tracks and sidings, to which the L&CVRR added 1.6 miles of new track. All of it served the steel mill, connecting with the Erie at both ends of its lines and with the Pennsylvania at the western end.

A major feature of the line was a set of beehive coke ovens. It looks like the L&CV received interchange hoppers of coal from the PRR (Lines West) and Erie and moved them to an unloading trestle, seen at the top of the photo here. A horizontal-rib Erie hopper is visible on the trestle. The coal went into larrys hauled by small electric locos, also shown, from which it was unloaded into the beehive ovens.

Once the coal was cooked into coke, it was unloaded from the ovens at a lower level and then loaded back into railroad hoppers, which hauled the coke to the Leetonia blast furnaces. The hoppers are barely visible on the lower left in this photo.

The track where the hoppers were unloaded was eight feet below the level where the workers are standing in this photo.

The Cherry Valley coke ovens remained, but abandoned, after the whole Leetonia operation shut down in 1930. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Village of Leetonia began a partial restoration project. Below is a more recent view of the ovens:

The track where the hoppers were reloaded with coke was in the trough at the bottom of the photo. So far, I haven't located any photos of the prototype Alco Brooks locos in service on the L&CV, but I would guess that they were standard steel mill locos in any case. Here's a shot of a Bachmann model with an Accurail as-delivered USRA hopper, the kind of car it seems to have handled routinely on the L&CV:

Erie-Lackawanna

The Erie-Lackawanna was my second railroad. My first was the PRR; I was born in Philadelphia, and a very early memory is of riding from Johnstown back to Philadelphia on a PRR train. Later, we moved to a central New Jersey town along the Amboy Secondary. But in 1957, we moved to Chatham, on the then-Lackawanna Morris & Essex Division. Our house was about two blocks from the tracks, and I could hear the Owl coming down the hill from Summit at night, dynamics whining.

My family has Lackawanna and Erie connections that go even farther back. The Bruce side was in Newark for two generations starting about 1900; my paternal grandmother was born in Campgaw on the then-Erie subsidiary NYS&W. My uncle began his working career as a steam fireman on the Lackawanna; he eventually rose to become CEO of Illinois Central; before that, he worked for Mr Perlman on Western Pacific.

By the time I was taking Latin in the 8th grade, the classroom windows overlooked the Chatham Lackawanna station. By then, it was the E-L, but the westbound Phoebe Snow went by at about 10:30, and if I turned around in my seat, I got a great view out the window. The problem was that this irked Mrs Wirsz, the Latin teacher. Finally, when the time came around and you could hear the diesels approaching, she would say, "All right, class, we're going to take a short break while John turns around to watch the train." I did OK in Latin, still speak it in church.

Not long ago, I ordered Revelation Video's Before The Hyphen, a DVD with archival footage of Erie, Lackawanna, and early E-L trains. This had footage of both the Lackawanna (Owl) and Erie (Atlantic and Pacific Limited) mail-express trains, which lasted through the mid-1960s and often had PA-1s, although usually mixed with Es. I'm still working out how I'm going to run a mail and express train on my layout, and this got me to pull a Proto 2000 E-L PA out of the display case and install DCC:

As you can see, I also have some Northwest Short Line brass Erie Stillwell coaches to go with it. The P2K is a very easy DCC conversion, so the next time I order decoders, I'll probably put one in its mate and run an A-A set. It'd be great, though, if one day someone would come out with an E-L E8. Meanwhile, I need to dig out some of my E-L head end cars.

There's a very good rundown of E-L passenger service here. During my time in 8th grade Latin, the Phoebe often had three units, one of which would be a PA, usually trailing. By then, the E-L was turning it into a mail-express train as well.

A few more E-L models that have gone through decoder installs:

A 1990s Walthers caboose kit I pulled off the back burner after seeing the new video:

More Vintage!

John R's post on (in part) bringing older models to life has made me up the priority on another post on the same thing here. He mentioned Varney cars. By the early 1960s, these were hard to find. I was being inspired in my early teens by the first published photos of Allen McClelland's V&O, and he used a lot of Varney hoppers, the prototypes of which were still very common. But in the early 60s, models of any such common cars were hard to find and, like Ulrich, expensive. McClelland had probably found his years earlier.

I finally found some second-hand Varneys at the old Troxel Brothers Models on Western Avenue in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. These were pretty dodgy. Varney was known in later years for cheap plastic that would warp (giving any plastic models, good or not, a bad rep in the 1950s). I found this out first hand. Here's one that warped, but I made lemonade out of lemons and did it as a swaybacked car using Herald King decals:

Here's another Varney with a different problem. I relettered it with dry transfers:

But notice the swelling and cracking at the center of the car, something that happened after I painted it in the 1970s. This was caused when the (cheap!) zinc alloy weight swelled and cracked:

The Germans call this Zinkpest, a very good word. I can probably salvage this car by removing the weight, crimping the swelled plastic back in place, and touching things up with paint and plastic cement. But I notice I did this before I began to understand the problems with pre-1960 or so coupler pockets. The coupler pockets here will need surgical replacement, too. No shortcuts with vintage stuff, I'm afraid!

Here's the problem with early coupler pockets. Apparently it was the introduction of the "NMRA" X2F horn-hook coupler that resulted in the coupler pocket dimension we now take for granted and first seems to have appeared on Athearn plastic cars in the late 1950s.

This Ulrich GS gon is a great model, outstanding for its day (but expensive) and certainly very good layout-quality even for now.

But as it came from the swap, it had only one coupler, an old Kadee #4. The chassis will begin to tell the story:

The old standard coupler pocket had a thin pivot post, onto which a coupler with a long slot in the shank would be installed. The slot had a spring that fit behind the center post -- the old Kadee 4s had an additional complication, in that they had a little keeper rod that went inside the spring to limit the travel of the shank. Once this was assembled, you then attached the coupler pocket cover over the center post and peened the top of the post to make it mushroom out and hold the cover on. Here's the end of the car where the old coupler fell out, which continues the story:

I believe that old Kadees, some dummies, the old Roundhouse-Devore couplers, and probably others worked this way. It was sort of a pre-standard, and it was awful, in that it was overcomplicated and fussy to assemble, and at best, it wasn't adjustable or maintainable.

Plus not everyone wanted to actually peen over the center post. I think that's what happened to this car:

The original owner installed Kadee 4s, which means it must have been post-1960 or so, but he didn't want to peen over the center post, so he just used model airplane glue to hold the coupler pocket cover on. The evidence speaks for itself. 55 years later I'm gong to have to Dremel all this off to clear out an area to install Kadee 158s with the plastic coupler box, attached with 2-56 screws. Let's hope some guy who gets this down the road in 2070 or so appreciates what I've done.

There are no shortcuts with vintage stuff! It took me a while to understand this when it was new.

Vintage

I probably have an attitude to the hobby that's a little like the guys who collect tinplate -- many of them like to relive the excitement of toy trains that they had when they were kids, either running them themselves or just wishing they had them then. I'm not really into tinplate, but when I started to read MR and the other hobby magazines when I was about 10 years old, I found what was in the stories and ads delightful, and I still like to recapture that delight.

However, I have a feeling that none of that stuff ran very well in the 1940s and 50s. The motors weren't good, the gears were plastic and wore out quickly (if they worked at all), the couplers weren't much good, the wheels and trucks were bad, and so forth. So what I like to do is track down some of the older models from the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s and try to bring them up to date for contemporary use.

The big things that have to be redone are trucks, couplers, wheels, and weight, as well as touchup of paint and replacement of parts where needed. Here's an example of an Ulrich N&W hopper from the 1950s that I now run with stuff 60 years newer:

It's a perfectly acceptable layout model. Here's another Ulrich hopper that's in the pipeline:

For starters, it needs contemporary trucks, wheels, and couplers. But as on the N&W hopper above, couplers are actually a big issue. I had to hack away at the 1950s coupler pockets with a Dremel on the N&W to carve out an area where I could install new Kadee 158s. The guy who had the D&H car here apparently did the same with a milling machine, but he stopped short:

He had the right idea, which will make things much easier for me, but it looks like, at least on the left, he tried to attach a coupler pocket with epoxy, which probably lasted a few hours at best. Why'd he go to all the trouble of milling and then not just drill #50 and tap 2-56? Who knows?

I probably held off on this one for a long time because the factory paint here is wrong -- the prototype D&H cars were black. But now I think out of respect for what it is, I'll just go ahead and finish it in red, new trucks, Kadee 158s (mounted with screws drilled and tapped), probably heavy weathering to take attention away from the color.

Another 1950s manufacturer was Central Valley. I get the impression that these kits were beyond a lot of modelers at the time; almost all that I find at swap meets aren't finished. For instance:

I'll need to dig up the grabs from another 1950s kit and finish this one. Here's another Central Valley I pulled out of the backlog not long ago:

Typical deal, one truck missing, dummy couplers, generally beat up. Here's the underframe:

You can see where the guy discovered, as I did long ago, that the Central Valley original dress-snap truck attachment was a bad idea. That was apparently back when dummy couplers were still an option! I found a set of original Central Valley sideframes, added new Kadee wheels, got rid of the dummy couplers, and at least cleaned up the chassis:

Still a way to go, but with Kadees and some paint touchup, it'll actually belong on a layout.

What's a little sad is that most of the vintage cars I find at swaps probably never gave their earlier owners any satisfaction. With work, though, they can be as delightful now as they could have been then. Maybe more to me -- gives me a sense of maybe fixing things I could have done better a long time ago.

Tweaks

I don't obsess over detail, but I usually make changes to any new model to suit my own preferences. One of the biggest is operational reliability. Couplers are a big issue: the plastic Kadee clones never work as well as the real metal ones (the Walthers metal ProtoMax are just as good, though), and McHenrys break almost immediately after you put them on a layout.

I tend to tolerate the Bachmann plastlic ones a little more, both because they're not quite as bad as Accumates and McHenrys, and because Bachmann's coupler mounts make them a pain to replace. MB Klein had a sale on Bachmann last month that went even beyond their normal disocunted price, and I picked up a NYC RS-3:

I replaced the stock decoder, also for operational improvement, but as long as I had the shell off, I decided to bite the bullet and Dremel off the cast coupler mount:

Then I drilled out with a 50 drill and tapped for a 2-56 screw to install Kadee boxes and couplers:

Since I was on a roll, I went ahead and did the same with a WM unit:

I lived with my family in Maryland for several years, but I was in college out of state for most of that time and never got a good enough chance to railfan the WM. As Bill Schaumburg once put it, modeling gives you a chance to relive the memories you never had!

I got a couple of NYC boxcars with the same order. I like the new Walthers Mainline boxcars more and more. Here's a Pacemaker car:

However, the factory paint left the underframe in light gray. Photos of even new cars show the underframe black, so I masked off the sides and hit the underframe with an airbrush. I also painted the truck sideframes and wheel faces black.

This Accurail car was all jade green out of the box, but as far as I can tell, NYC jade green cars with the large emblem had black ends and roof, so I fixed this at the same time as the Pacemaker car:

Note the replacement Kadee 158s. It also got Kadee wheels. Eventually I'll also add A Line stirrups to the Accurail car.