Four Cars For $9

I'm a sucker for the vintage cars you can often find very cheaply at swap meets. Last Saturday at the Simi Valley swap, a seller had a couple boxes of vintage cars selling for $3 each or four for $9. I bit.

This is an Ambroid Western Union material car kit from 1959. I already have one of these, and this one is beat-up, with about a C-plus assembly job, but I think I can fix it up with some work. In fact, although I already have one, there were 20 prototypes according to the 1959 MR review, and the car is a lot of fun.

Here is a Life-Like boxcar from the 1980s, I guess. The prototype lettered for Linde was an AAR steel boxcar body that contained a tank for liquid oxygen. Once I got the car home and looked it over, it comes from Varney tooling from the 1950s. The most recent Life-Like runs had interesting paint schemes, like this one, but they have the usual truck-mounted horn hook couplers, pizza cutter plastic wheels, the big bolster holes, and they need weight.

AHM stock car from the 1960s or so. Needs the same work as the Life-Like car

The prototype is a New York Central car (John R, I can send you an article on doing these if you'll give me your e-mail). However, I wanted a green and yellow CNW, and this was the easiest way to get one.

I hesitated over this last one. It looked vaguely like a Walthers, but not quite, and the paint has got to go -- but for less than $3, I decided to give it a try.

Now that I've been able to look more closely, it seems to be an Athearn 4-truck flat body bashed with Walthers span bolsters, plus some other interesting changes. It has some real possibilities.

I'm almost done with the Linde box and am well along with others. I'll post on what I do with some or all of these.

Finding My Way With DCC

I like Bachmann diesels, since they're reasonably priced with very good paint jobs and acceptable layout-quality detail -- higher end models have details that tend to drop off or break off in handling, for instance. On the other hand, as I proceed with DCC, some of the Bachmann diesels have problems.

The most recent non-sound GP7s and GP9s, for instance, no longer have 8-pin NMRA sockets but have a factory-installed motherboard that includes the DCC decoder. The problem is that Bachmann DCC decoders are poorly documented, and they appear not to support CVs that most other makes of decoder do support. It used to be easy to swap out a Bachmann decoder for a better-quality one. Now you have to pull the factory board and hardwire a decoder, and you also have to add resistors for the LEDs:

This has the additional problem that hardwiring leads to errors. In this case, apparently some heat shrink tubing slipped while I was putting the final wires into place as I replaced the shell, and bare wires touched and shorted, blowing the first decoder. But redoing it, I finally got a decent loco:

Bachmann did a good jpob with the BAR paint. I touched up the trucks and fuel tank with prototype silver and weathered the grills on the hood.

The Blue Cut Fire

The so-called Blue Cut Fire currently burning in Cajon Pass looks like it will seriously change the environment for railfanning when it's eventually brought under control. Just for starters, here's the McDonald's where I often got lunch:

As far as I can tell from news reports, this is an exceptionally destructive fire that is still out of control at least between Devore and Summit, heavily damaging rail infrastructure. This appears to be a bridge on the UP above Canyon siding:

Rail traffic on the pass was stopped since Tuesday, with Amtrak 3 and 4 detouring via Mojave and Burbank. Service was restored on BNSF yesterday afternoon.

The question will be when, and to what extent, highway access to good railfan spots will be restored, especially along old Route 66 and Highway 138. If I can get up there next week, I'll try to check things out.

Howard Fogg P&LE Postcards

Around 1960, my uncle was working at US Steel in Pittsburgh. As a low-level management employee, he sometimes got the little lagniappes the railroads gave US Steel managers to keep the company happy. In this case, he got a set of postcards made from paintings John W Barriger, then-president of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie, commissioned from Howard Fogg. He passed them on to me. I kept them and recently scanned them. Here are several:

There's a website on Howard Fogg P&LE postcards and an entry on Fogg in Wikipedia. There's something inspiring about Howard Fogg to railfans that we don't seem to see 60 years later. These postcards were really inspiring to me. My connection to Pittsburgh and the P&LE was never more than a few family visits around 1960, but the postcards gave me a continuing interest, and I've posted on some of the P&LE items in my collection.

One puzzle that recently came up was the source for this color scheme on the Bachmann Sound Value S-4:

There was some discussion about this on various forums, and the consensus seems to be that there was never a prototype loco painted in this scheme, but it does appear on a Fogg postcard:

Tweaking Accurail

One thing that I haven't seen pointed out about some Accurail cars is that they have recesses molded into the backs of the side sills that correspond to the tabs you sometimes see. This applies to their steel reefers and their 50-foot boxcars. It's possible to use the recesses as guides to carve out the side sills and leave tabs. Here's a stock fishbelly side sill on an Accurail B&O 50-foot box:

Here's a WP 50-foot box where I carved out the fishbelly to leave tabs:

Here's a pair of unmodified Accurail steel reefer sills:

Here's a BAR car where I carved out tabs on the sidesill based on the cast-in recesses:

This is a doable project, but it isn't all that quick or easy. The carving itself needs a couple of sharp #11 blades and takes 1-2 hours, but then it's necessary to touch up the paint.