The Woods Line -- I

John Allen's G&D layout is a major inspiration for mine, although I have maybe half his space. One thing he did was incorporate logging operations in his plan. There was a log reload at Sowbelly, which is depicted on this RMC cover. As far as I can tell, logs were loaded in the scene here at Sowbelly and hauled to a sawmill at Andrews. I don't have space for a sawmill, so the logs will need to go to a sawmill in staging.

John Allen was also in my parents' generation, and the railroad scenes that inspired him mostly date from the 1930s, 40s, and early 50s -- he seems to have lost interest in the prototype when steam was phased out, as well as when lines like the Virginia & Truckee were abandoned.

I come from a later generation, and I like diesels and newer equipment, though I don't rule out the steam era completely.

Railroad logging hasn't completely disappeared. But up into the 1980s, the BN and Milwaukee Road hauled a lot of logs in the Pacific Northwest. My own operation is inspired by late operations like these, as well as other late log haulers like Weyerhaeuser, the Camas Prairie and the Oregon, California & Eastern. It currently uses power leased from BN/GN.

My woods line runs from a connection with the main at Loma Linda, over a trestle, past a wood chip loader, and ends at a more modern style log reload. The engine house at the connection was scratchbuilt from foamcore and Paper Creek building papers, with Grandt Line parts:

The reload area is currently in work. Here's how I roughed it out:

This won't be the G&D at Sowbelly, but it'll be an equivalent scene, 50-60 years later. I'll go into finishing the reload in my next post.

Swap Meet Rehabs

For whatever reason, the pickings at last Saturday's Simi Valley swap meet were slim and overpriced. I did find some promising items, including this BN quad hopper built from a 1990s Walthers kit. It was $5. Once I got it home and looked it over more carefully, I thought $5 was just a little much.

The builder for whatever reason had substituted older plain-bearing trucks for the roller-bearing trucks that came with the kit. He'd also screwed up the truck mounts on the bolsters. I scrounged in my junk box for replacement trucks and plugged-redrilled and tapped the bolsters for 2-56 screws. The builder apparently found the door latches in the kit too challenging to assemble, so they weren't with the car.

A big change I make on older cars is to make sure the couplers are replaceable, maintainable, and adjustable, Walthers 1990s kits didn't have screw mounted coupler box covers, so I had to pry the covers off -- they'd been cemented in -- and carefully drill out the center pivot posts #50 and the covers #42, tap the holes in the pivot posts, and reinstall Kadees. The builder for whatever reason had shortened and rebent the Kadee "hoses". Since I operate with Kadee magnets, I had to replace the Kadees with new ones.

Since the BN paint scheme dates from the 1970s, I found a prototype photo on the web that showed the location of the ACI label, which I try to add to all cars that date from the 1968-78 period.

But once I saw it, I noticed that the factory paint left off the conspicuity marks from the lower side of the car. Luckily, I had a Microsale BN freight car set on hand that had these, so I added them. I added Kadee 36 inch wheels with the faces painted Tru Color Rail Brown:

I also weathered the interior with Tru Color Rail Brown, and I also dusted the sides with a mix of a little Tru Color Grimy Black and a lot of Tru Color Flat and lacquer thinner. This toned the white lettering down a little and blended things in.

The other side of the car had some of its lettering either scuffed up at the factory or scraped off as part of normal wear and tear. I finessed this with more of the diluted Grimy Black on that side of the car.

The Walthers quad hoppers fell off the radar for some years, but they've released new versions as Mainline RTR. It looks like they have metal Kadee compatible couplers, new die cast underframes, added detail, metal wheels, and new paint. In the $20 range, I think these are good value for the increased price over the 1990s version.

The Joy Of AHM

I went to the bimonthly Simi Valley swap meet yesterday, which reminded me of how much fun it is to find old AHM cars from the 1960s and 70s. There's a page on AHM freight cars here, with writeups and photos on each type, and often each variation of each type. The overall quality varied, but in some cases, they had paint schemes that, even if they weren't prototypical, are very attractive.

Over the years, I've found a number at swap meets that had a lot of potential. Some of the rarer ones, like the helium car, are more expensive (but it depends on who's selling and what the condition is anyhow), but in other cases, AHM cars are among the cheapest you can find, at prices ranging from 50 cents to a couple of bucks. Then you can get them home, toss the trucks and replace them with screw mounts and metal wheels, body-mount Kadees, add weight, and start to have items that are genuinely fun to see and operate.

I posted here about a Roma Wine 6-dome tank car I found last year and upgraded. Actually, I found two of them, 50 cents each. The other had some missing parts. Tony Thompson dumps all over the AHM Roma Wine car here, which is typical of his approach to the hobby -- if you can't locate a brass version, or his old Thomas car, you're a low creature indeed.

I'm not sure. Searching for 6-dome wine car info on the web, I'm starting to get the impression that no two were alike, or at least it seems that way. There were different builders with different options, for instance. There were more operators of these cars than Roma Wine. Looking around, I found these decals available from Protocraft for a Gibson Wine Company car:

The photos of Gibson Wine cars with the Protocraft instructions show cars with proportions very similar to the AHM car, even if the AHM may be too large. Here is what I came up with, for 50 cents plus decals, trucks, and Kadees:

Here are a couple of other AHM cars I've reworked over the years. In 1996, I had a work assignment in Amarillo, TX. It was in the summer, and when I got off work each day, there was plenty of light available to go railfanning (I'm sorry I missed Amarillo in the 1960s). The last of the helium cars were operating out of the area at the time, and I got a lot of photos:

Here's an AHM car I reworked:

After a lot of seeking, I found out that the AHM pulpwood car has an N&W prototype:

This car will look good with "logs", but I haven't gotten around to cutting them. Here's a shot of the prototype:

It looks like AHM shrunk the model to fit their standard box. It's off, but I like it. Tony Thompson is unlikely to visit my layout and complain, anyhow. Yesterday I found an AHM in-transit heated tank car for $2:

These were developed in 1962 by Union Tank Line to meet a US Steel need to haul molten coal tar pitch. Someone pointed me to an ad from the period:

My uncle, who finished his career as CEO of Illinois Central, worked for US Steel in the 1960s and was involved in the development and testing of these cars, of which at least several were built. He has always been doubtful that the design lasted very long, as what he worked on involved a propane-fired engine and heater and a highly flammable cargo of coal tar pitch. He rode along on tests and was always conscious that these cars were, as he put it, "rolling bombs". On the other hand, there are still pitch cars with in-transit heaters in service, such as a CGTX series 18450-18499 -- too far away in appearance from the AHM car,although an internal combustion engine, fan, and heater seem to be still involved.

Again, I think upgrading this model with new trucks, body mount couplers, weight, paint, and some finer details will be a lot of fun.

Restoration Job Done

A while ago, I put up a post on an Ambroid phosphate car I picked up at a swap meet for 50 cents. It had been very competently assembled, but it was pretty beat up.

I added weight and chiseled off the wood channels on the side, which had been broken pretty badly. Once the channels were off, I gave the "steel" surfaces of the kit two coats of sanding sealer and replaced the wood channels with styrene. Then I gave it a new coat of paint, which spruced it up pretty well.

There weren't any decals with the car. The original kit had ACL decals with it, but I found one or two sites on the web that talked about this car and said the decals weren't much good (like all 1950s decals). Looking at the lettering on a copy of the instruction sheet I found on line told me that I wouldn't be able to use any ACL lettering currently available. Eventually I decided not to try to reconstruct things with alphabet decals and just used some decals I had made up for my own roadname.

Although I can't see how the Los Feliz and North Western could use phosphate cars, I weathered it like the ones that still run in Florida:

In part, I was inspired by new Youtube videos of the Franklin & South Manchester. There's something fascinating about models lettered for the home layout that have been heavily weathered.

The loco switching it is another project I recently finished, a Walthers RS-2 with a decoder:

For whatever reason, this run hasn't sold well, and they're available very cheaply in various places on the web. Not least at Walthers themselves. I just ordered a Rock Island unit for a little over $50 at Walthers.

Newer Walthers runs have 9-pin DCC sockets. These have lots of problems on both Athearn and Walthers models. The 9-pin socket on the UP unit was bad, and I wound up pulling out the whole PC board and putting in a hard wired decoder, which of course led to its own set of complications.

But it's done.

Trial Run Of Tweaked Bachmann RS-3 On Local

A month ago I posted on some tweaks I made to a couple of Bachmann RS-3s. I replaced the factory decoders with Digitrax DZ126PSs and Dremeled off the Bachmann coupler mounts so I could install Kadee 158s with their coupler boxes. This weekend I took the WM unit for a trial run on a local, which is in JMRI as train LM160, the 1st West Egg Roustabout. ("Roustabout" is a term that was used on the Erie and DL&W for way freights. My uncle's first railroad job was firing a steam loco on a Lackawanna "Roustabout".)

One thing I've done in the 20 years or so since I've been running computer switchlists has been to tailor jobs with different sizes, noting what the prototype sometimes does. For instance, the Santa Fe and now BNSF has some jobs that it designates with names like "1st Fullerton Road Switcher", "2nd Fullerton Road Switcher" and so forth. The jobs serve the same general areas but switch different industries. It began to dawn on me that I could do this on my model railroad, giving me the ability to have different jobs that switch the same area but do more or less work, depending on how ambitious I feel.

So there are several "West Egg Roustabout" jobs that do more or less work in West Egg. The exact work they do depends on what the switchlist program comes up with, so I get to be surprised, but there's a limit to how surprised I can get, which is great. Here was the switchlist for Friday's 1st West Egg Roustabout (you can click on the image to get a more readable copy):

A bonus was that PRR 674159 is the scratchbuilt H39 I made 30+ years ago from a block of scrap 2x4 and only recently got into operation. So I tested both the Bachmann RS-3 with upgrades and the PRR hopper. Both worked quite well.

I really like the way the Bachmann RS-3 responds to the throttle (the much better Digitrax decoder), how well it picks up current, and its general power and ability to pull a long yard track. All the WM and B&O stuff we've had from Bachmann seems to come from the late Lee Riley's work as Vice President of Product Development. I hope Bachmann continues to come out with worthwhile prototypes without his decades of great work.

Other Small Locos

As I said in my last post, an early layout I built was a shelf layout, what Carl Arendt might have called a micro. I'm still interested in the idea, I have a very small micro on a shelf in a storage room near my layout room, and i don't rule out building another -- someday, I may need to go back to the shelf layout in the walk-in closet. So I keep looking for interesting small locos.

The Bachmann Porter 0-6-0T side tank loco seems to be the successor to the Spectrum saddle tank. According to the review in the January 2014 MR, the Bachmann Porter 0-6-0T is a class C S-K locomotive weighing between 75 and 83 tons, shown in the 1892 Porter catalog. Here's the one I got:

Like the Spectrum loco in the last post, it looks good with Accurail as-delivered USRA hoppers:

This is a good loco for micro layouts, but the two hoppers you see look to be about its limit. I haven't found a photo of any prototype much like it. The Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal had two side-tank Porters, but they were larger and heavier than this one.

I got involved in a round-robin project on the old Whistle Post forum, which was a good combination of friendliness and interesting content -- no forums are left that are like that one. (I got to know Ralph V there.) The late forum owner sent out an old Roundhouse saddle tank 0-6-0T for members to successively assemble, paint, detail, and post photos. I did some preliminary assembly, testing, and painting:

The fire truck was for the local railfans to fill the boiler so it could be steamed up! Looks like the motor on this one gave up the ghost fairly quickly, and then the whole thing went south as, pretty much predictably, a member got it in the round robin and disappeared. This model dates from the 1950s, I think, and had its drive upgraded in the 1970s. However, it's no match for recent Bachmanns.

Here's a Roundhouse EMD Model 40:

I haven't tried converting this to DCC, but it's a very good runner on DC. There's a Model 40, ex US Navy, at the Travel Town museum in Los Angeles, not far from where I live:

Here's a Ken Kidder brass steam dummy from the 1960s that I painted up to run on my early shelf layout:

However, the couplers were always set at the HOn3 level, and I never fixed that, so I never switched with it. At this point, I would try to replace the couplers with offset-shank Kadees -- but then I'd have to look at DCC. The prototype steam dummy ran on a pier in San Diego.