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.