A Busy Week Of Railfanning

US Highway 101, the main route up the California coast north of Los Angeles, was closed near Santa Barbara by a mudslide following heavy rain on January 9. The stretch between Ventura and Santa Barbara is a chokepoint, since the interior is mainly rugged wilderness, and there are no alternate roads. With the 101 closed, the only way to get south from Santa Barbara involved a several hundred mile detour north, east, and then south via Interstate 5.

However, the Amtrak/Union Pacific Coast Line remained open with minimal interruption, and people wanting to get to Santa Barbara from the south realized they could still take the Amtrak Surfliners. These normally run six or seven cars. The trains were mobbed. In at least one case, local police had to be called to maintain order at a station. Amtrak personnel referred to "Tokyo subway conditions". Over the weekend of January 13-14, Amtrak sent two additional P32-8 locos from northern California and several CDTX coaches from San Joaquin-Capitol service south to augment Surfliner trains.

Amtrak added additional locomotives and Superliner coaches from equipment in Los Angeles so that each Surfliner train got an additional two or three cars. This meant an additional loco had to be added to each train. Normally Surfliners running to Santa Barbara have the loco, either an F59PHI or a P42, on the north end, with a Surfliner cab car on the south end. On the expanded trains, the extra loco was on the south end.

On Wednesday, January 17, I went down to the nearby Glendale station to see how things were running. Here's Amtrak 458, one of the usual Surfliner F59PHIs, at the head of a very late train 761 that morning:

Here's 761's conductor not looking real happy:

Here's a blurred shot of one of the cars that came down from up north, a formerly wrecked Superliner that was rebuilt and repainted for San Juaquin service:

And an extra Superliner coach:

Here's P32-8BWH 510 shoving on the rear, with an extra Superliner just ahead of it:

Although the P32s are common on the Coast Starlight, they don't normally run on Surfliner trains. This Train 761 had a total of three Amtrak Superliners and the San Joaquin rebuilt Superliner.

Southbound 768 arrived about a half hour later, with an F59PHI unusually on the south end of the train:

This 768 was cobbled together from normal Surfliner cars, but out of order and with extras. A regular coach is on the south end here, rather than the usual cab car:

Here's the long 768 at the platform. A P42 was on the north end.

This past Wednesday I went down to Vernon to catch the BNSF Malabar local.

A great feature of this location is the Pabco Paper plant that borders the west side of the yard:

For the last half dozen years I've watched it, the job nomrally gets a genset and a GP-whatever.

Highway 101 was reopened Sunday January 21. I was in Oxnard yesterday and found Train 782 back to its normal consist, cab car on the south end, F59PHI shoving from the north:

As a bonus, I caught this freshly painted, untagged GP40-2, pretty close to 50 years old:

Another Bachmann Western Pacific GP7

A while ago, I posted about getting a Bachmann Western Pacific GP7 and installing an NCE BACH-DSL decoder. The Bachmann GP7s and GP9s have gotten to be among my favorites -- with replacement decoders, they're very quiet, smooth runners. They're very rugged layout-quality locos, and with careful shopping, they can be found at very reasonable prices. I found another WP GP7 at a price too good to pass up.

The biggest detail issue with WP locos is that those ordered in the 1950s and 60s had steam-era style barrel headlights. As I understand it, this was to allow WP to use up its inventory of steam-era light bulbs. The model has the much more common twin vertical lights. However, at around the time of the color scheme change to overall green with orange lettering in 1970, WP began to replace the large headlights. I do have one photo of a GP7 in orange and silver with the new style headlight.

Eventually, it seems as though no two orange-and-silver locos had exactly the same paint scheme on WP, with variations in striping, lettering, and what parts were orange. However, it seems as though no prototype GP7 on th WP had the silver stripe in the middle of the short hood. As far as I'm concerned, these are layout-quality locos. While I've started some weathering, there's clearly scope for a lot more.

While the loco number appears on the cab side near the WP logo, it's so small, it's not worth renumbering there. I did renumber the loco to 707 from the factory 709 in the end number boards. On this loco, I saw some bleedthrough from the headlight into the shell. I fixed this with a small piece of aluminum foil inside the shell, held in with CA glue.

I do expect a lot more traffic to the East Coast on the Penn Central car movement posts to go via WP. The extra GP7 should be very helpful.

Roundhouse CSX C4400AH

I decided to take a chance on a Roundhouse CSX C4400AH in the YN2 scheme. "Roundhouse" seems to be a recent rebranding of the former Athearn RTR line without too much other change.

This in turn is based on Athean bluebox tooling from the 1990s, although there have been gradual upgrades over the years. I've been a little less than lukewarm about Athearn in recent years, with key disadvantages from my point of view being the incandescent headlight bulbs that quickly burn out, and the wires to which make shell removal and replacement difficult; flimsy and brittle handrails; and the unreliable 9-pin DCC plug connectors -- the failure rate for these in my experience is probably over 30%.

A plus in this loco from the box is that, although it's priced comparably to equivalent Bachmann and Walthers Mainline locos, which don't have separate grab irons inserted at the factory, this one does. The paint is quite good. It and the detail with the loco makes it pretty accurate for later C4400AHs delivered in later 1990s orders, but the cab roof detail does not include more contemporary GPS dome or PTC antenna array.

The dynamic brake vents on the shell match the CSX variation, and the high-adhesion steerable GE truck sideframes match those on the later CSX prototypes.

I replaced the brittle McHenry factory-supplied couplers with a Kadee 146 long-shank centerset coupler on the front and a Kadee 158 coupler on the rear. On most locos, I also replace the factory coupler pocket with the new style Kadee supplied with their whisker type couplers. This is much easier to handle and place preassembled in the pilot than factory supplied versions.

As pointed out in product descriptions, the ditch lights on this model are dummy. The nose headlight is the standard Athearn two incandescent bulbs. Prototype locos operate with only the nose headlight lit in the yard or in situations where ground personnel could be blinded by ditchlights. The rear hood headlight is also lit on the model. I plan to bypass the headlight-ditch light issue mainly by running this loco as a trailing unit.

CSX ACs turn up fairly frequently in California.

So far, I like this Roundhouse loco. Shell removal and decoder installation were quite easy. It's a smooth runner, although the drive train is dated by this point, and it's noisier than my recent Walthers SD70ACe.

Walthers Mainline SD70ACe

I just got this out of my shop today, only to find that CSX has retired its small number of SD70ACes and is sending them back to Progress Rail.

The CSX units were early examples of the model, apparently built before the Progress Rail regime took over, and had mechanical problems. In addition, the Walthers tooling isn't strictly right for CSX, as it has the gasket recess at the front of the nose. This is similar to what was on the SD60I locos built for Conrail. The lack of noise insulation in the CSX SD70Aces led to crew complaints. Progress Rail is apparently going to rebuild the CSX locos and find a new buyer. CSX meanwhile is concentrating on GE power.

I got the DCC-ready, non-sound version with the idea of installing a Digitrax PX108-2 Power Xtender. I'm discovering two things: the Digitrax PX108-2 is pretty bulky, bigger than a normal HO decoder of any sort these days, and the Walthers Mainline diesels aren't consistently laid out. For instance, the SD60M in fact has enough room in the speaker enclosure that you can put the PX108-2 in there on a non-sound loco. But the SD60 standard cab isn't laid out quite the same, and you need to Dremel out more space.

The SD70ACe is laid out completely differently from the SD60s of either type. I had to cut off the rear of the upper interior frame entirely to fit the PX108-2. and this was a long job and a close run thing.

Once I got the Digitrax DH126 decoder installed, though, all went well, although the DCC-ready loco is wired backward at the factory, and I had to set the configuration variable to reverse when I programmed the loco. The removal of the rear of the upper frame meant I had to forego a rear headlight, but this isn't a big loss.

On this loco, the PX108-2 lets it run for about 24 inches if I cut off the power. This isn't a smooth transition -- I set the momentum CVs 3 and 4 to 1, and this may be affected by the change to capacitor power, But what I'm hoping is that this will greatly reduce outright stalling on hard-to-reach track that's dirty and hard to clean.

Recent Projects

Here are some recent projects. First, an Atlas yellowbox L&N RS-3 from the early 1980s that I found on eBay and installed a decoder:

I got this to run with a Bachmann Sound Value L&N RS-3. It turns out that both locos run well together on DCC without speed matching:

118, the Atlas loco, is in the late 1950s all-black. 108 is in the as-delivered scheme. It's interesting to compare the models. The Bachmann has finer handrails and aluminum window frames and, of course, sound. The paint on the Bachmann is more opaque, so even with locos at comparable price points, there's been a lot of progress over 35 years. I would still say, though, that Atlas yellowbox locos are among the better bargains you can find on eBay. Penn Central fans can note that there were extensive transfer operations with L&N power in the Cincinnati area, and L&N is a generally neglected prototype.

Here is a Boston & Maine "local caboose" that I'm nearly finished with:

I kitbashed it by cutting the center out of an old Roco-AHM wide vision caboose and splicing the ends together. I painted the sides with Tru Color B&M blue and added the black stripe from Micro Scale black trim decal film. The lettering is an old Herald King set, not really accurate, but I was at least able to use it up. I still need to shim the trucks to get the car level and the couplers at the right height.

Here is an Accurail special-run boxcar painted for similar (but not exact) cars on the Sacramento Northern. My wife got it for me on our October trip to the Western Railway Museum, which operates on a 5.5 mile segment of the original Sacramento Northern main line:

One thing I've noticed from watching DVDs with archival railfan footage from the 1950s and 60s is how many boxcars of the period either had the paint weathered off their roofs and showed bare metal, had their roofs painted silver, or had the roofs left bare metal from the start. I've tried various ways of representing this, but my favorite recently is Testors Metalizer Steel, which thins with acetone and is easy to airbrush. Here's a WP boxcar I recently did this way:

This has an A Line track cleaning pad installed.

Penn Central Car Movement 42 B

Two fellow modelers and bloggers, John R and Ralph V, came up with an interesting twist on "interchange" between model railroads. What they figured out was that many layouts share cars with the same number -- bluebox cars, for instance -- and it's easy to conceptualize that bluebox car A "moves" from one layout to another. Two other modelers have been adding to this idea, Neal M and Engineer Ed.

John R used a set of my custom decals to letter a duplicate of a car on my layout, Los Feliz and North Western 160. We ran an "exchange" of this car late last year. Now I'm joining the full Penn Central Car Movement fun with movement 42.

LFNW 160 will return to the Empire Belt with canned goods from the Oswego Manufacturing Company in West Egg, consigned to Ralph's Grocery in Empire City. In addition, a PFE mechanical reefer will be consigned from the Citrus Association packing house in Sunkist to the Cold Storage Warehouse at Terminal Yard on the Empire Belt. p>Below we see 1/87 John R signaling Engineer Ed on the SP switcher that they've made a good joint:

SP 1481 pulls the spur and returns via Jaques:

Meanwhile, Sir Neal pulls LFNW 160 from Oswego Manufacturing while Ralph V flags traffic:

Both cars are switched in Manhattan Transfer and will go out to the SP tonight, to get to the Penn Central via SP, UP, and CNW:

Scenery Work At Tunnel 6

After a year of inactivity in this area, I began to add rockwork around the bare plaster cloth at the Tunnel 6 portal. Here's the way it was in late 2016:

I started the project by adding some pre-painted Woodland Scenics rock castings, sticking them on with Liquid Nails for Projects:

Then I began to add loose rocks and dirt from my collection of coffee cans around the castings. Once this was in position, I sprayed the area with water from a garden spray bottle and drizzled Elmer's glue on top. I repeated this several times and let things dry overnight.

Vegetation will follow.

Project For The New Year

My visit to the Western Railway Museum last October rekindled my interest in trolleys and interurbans. Here's East Bay Street Railways car 352, which I rode on that visit:

Below is a really sad case: the Los Angeles Harbor Department, overflowing with cash, built reproductions of two Pacific Electric 500-class cars, which it ran for about ten years on a stretch of ex SP track in San Pedro. A year or so ago, property developers got the land, and the trolley was discontinued.

Anyhow, when I first set up the city of Zenith on my layout, I originally intended to run trolley track down the middle of the main street. I found some precast street sections that were designed to be set up so you could lay HO track and butt the street surface up against it. Here's how the project originally looked about 1995:

However, after some experiment, I found that the street sections weren't set up for realistic curves at the corners -- HO trolleys and interurbans need somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 inch minimum radius, and this is too much for a normal street corner or intersection. So I wound up filling in the space in the street I'd originally meant for trolley track:

But after coming home from the museum, I began to realize I might not need to take the sharp curve at the corner that I'd originally intended. Instead, I could just barely get the track off the middle of the street and make it curve into private right of way behind some urban buildings. I set up a test with some scrap track:

It helps that the scenery here is a combination of old and dusty and never quite finished. What I will need to do will be to carve out a rebate to insert track in the middle -- I hope this will be a little easier for much of the distance, since I filled the space with Sculptamold 20 years ago, which I'm hoping will be easier to work than plaster.

But at least I can add some trolley operation, however minimal, when I got stumped on this 20 years ago.