Looking At My "Purgatory Box"

Fellow blogger and modeler John R has what he calls a "purgatory box", which is a place he puts older models that he obtained in his younger days in the hobby, but for various reasons has taken off the layout, maybe because the trucks and couplers are no longer up to standard, or the paint job is too toylike.

I realized I have something similar, but I never gave it a name. "Purgatory box" is a really good one! In my case, nearly everything in the box is an Athearn bluebox loco. Some of them are from the old wide body days of the 1970s. I spent a lot of time with those, but I haven't run them for a long time. I may well never bring them back.

More recent ones in my "purgatory box" are the newer, narrow-hood GP38-2s and SD40-2s. These were an advance, but I often gave up on them before I could put them into service on a real layout like the one I began in the late 1980s. Pickup was poor due to the old sintered metal wheels and metal strips that carried power to the motor. The coupler mounts needed a lot of rework before you could mount Kadees properly. The metal handrails were a bear to assemble. The huge HO diesel detail aftermarket grew up almost entirely because the Athearn bluebox locos needed so much work.

However, there are some candidates that can be put into service without too much effort. I seem to have gotten pretty far with them, but once better models from Atlas, Kato, and so forth turned up, I took the path of least resistance and put those into service first, just deferring work on the blueboxes. For 20 or more years.

The new Walthers Mainline Soo SD60 changed my priorities. I got more interested in the Soo in the 1990s, when MR ran a number of articles on the railroad, especially the Red Wing project layout in the December 1994 MR. Inspired by the article, which included early instructions on how to convert an Athearn loco to DCC, I got a bluebox Soo GP38-2. I finished detailing it back then, but set it aside. Nearly 25 years later, it's going into service.

It needs some paint touchup. I converted it to DCC:

One thing that confirmed my interest in the Soo Line was that, after CP became the designated operator of the D&H, Soo-CP power would run through onto Guilford, one of my favorite prototypes. The runthrough power was frequently Soo SD60s, as well as Soo and CP SD40-2s. But in the 1990s, there was no easy way to get to a SOO SD60, just the Rail Power Products body and Proto Power West chassis, and a lot of work. The new Walthers model has changed that!

Speaking of Proto Power West, they made "tweaked" Athearn chassis, with extra lead weight, can motors, wire pickup, and tuned mechanics. I have a lot of those in reserve.

The good thing about these was that in the days before DCC and speed matching, you could get an Athearn loco with a PPW chassis to run with an Atlas or Kato loco. The can motors also drew less current.

I have two CP "snoot" bluebox locos that won't be too hard to put into operation. This one, a dummy, will probably get the PPW chassis above, with a DCC decoder:

Here's a Soo SD40-2:

This one already has a bluebox chassis that's had new wheels and a PPW upgrade kit installed. Like a number of these, it was very close to being finished, but it was just a lot easier to get a new Atlas loco or whatever!

A lot of guys who did a lot of work with bluebox locos in the 1970s and 80s built up a surplus of aftermarket parts, expecting things never to change. But the locos that have been available since the 1990s are so much more detailed that a lot of the aftermarket parts will never be used. At least these projects are letting me work my way through my own surplus!