Intermodal Ops 1F -- Other Intermodal

Since this series has been something of an incentive for me to pull out model intermodal equipment I hadn't been using, I'm going to continue with a couple other equipment categories.

The first is a Coach Yard brass model of a Santa Fe mail container flat. These were converted from heavyweight passenger cars in 1960 and 1962 and numbered 220-226.

This is actually the first time I ever took this out of the box, although it had been in my closet for 20 years or so. I think the main obstacle was that nobody ever made decals for the containers. However, it shoudn't be that much of a task to print up the decals with black lettering on decal paper using my computer printer. Maybe I need to get on this!

I believe these ran mostly on the San Francisco Chief in the 1960s. The Santa Fe in the 1960s had other flats that carried early Railway Express Agency style containers, and I think these could be found in mail and pggybck trains as well.

Next is a Walthers 1950s piggyback flat with a Classic Metal Works UP trailer. It took this series to get me to put the two together, but I now have to figure out exactly how I'll use them.

Last is a bigger issue and a different kind of intermodal. Here is an Atlas flat for municipal solid waste containers.

This kind of container seems to be used mostly in the New York-New Jersey area, but it's by no means the only kind of container in this sort of service. In my part of the country, several types are in use, mostly for "dirty dirt" transfer of contaminated soil to landfills in places like Utah. Another type is simply old 20-foot containers with the roof removed and replaced with a tarp:

Note that the flat car seems to be the same, with similar reporting marks, as the Atlas model. But more common are containers that don't seem to have commercial model equivalents:

Containers like these can also be found in regular well cars.

1980s And 1990s Bachmann

Bachmann really began to improve its products in the mid to late 1980s. According to the HO Scale Trains Resource, Bachmann went to a single power truck for its diesel loco offerings in the late 1970s, and although the body die work was often acceptable, the pancake motor basically put Bachmann in the "junk" category at the time. I think I probably began to recognize that things were changing with the upgraded Spectrum line and the 8-40C of the late 1980s.

Model Railroader published an article, "Union Pacific Dash 8-40C" by David A. Bontrager in its June 1991 issue. He added a number of details and touched up the paint and weathering. I did three of these at the time, one each of the three road numbers they offered. Here's one of the ones I did following his MR article at the time:

The flywheel-equipped fore-and-aft all-wheel drive train was a big improvement, and the loco was a smooth runner. I wound up getting a number of these, but the major difficulty was the split frame, which made DCC installation difficult. The original Bachmann Plus SD45s of the 1990s were good runners with acceptable layout-quality detail, but the split frame also made DCC installation a problem. (Apparently Bachmann later upgraded this model to a Spectrum version with a non-split frame and a DCC compatible 8-pin socket. I haven't seen any of these.)

I picked up a number of the SD45s in the 1990s, too. You could get them at discount, as I recall, in the $30-40 range. I detailed a number of them and started with others, but eventually I lost interest. Just recently a German model railroad YouTuber whose channel is named hd springer talked about getting one of the vintage Bachmann SD45s and converting the split frame to DCC. I made a comment and said I wanted to follow what he did. He answered and posted this video:

His method is remarkably easy, a couple hours work for each loco. Unfortunately, I still need to get some N or Z size decoders to fit in the limited space inside the body, but I'll have some locos ready to solder them in when they come. I took his conversion a little farther and kitbashed the factory PC board to allow easy solder-in install of hardwire decoders:

Here's a Union Pacific version that I added some details to. The rewiring for DCC has been done.

Another project now is a Spectrum B23-7. This actually has a one-piece frame, but the wiring isn't too different from Bachmann split-frame locos. I updated the wiring on this following the hd springer YouTube and will install a decoder when it arrives. The paint on many of these locos is so good that it's hard to tell them from Atlas or other more expensive locos at normal layout viewing distances. I plan to rewire my 8-40Cs and install DCC in them as well.

Intermodel Virtual Ops 1A

Well, when John R proposed this project, I was still early in the process of unpacking my intermodal equipment, and by today's start date for the series, I find I'm still quite early in the task of testing, tuning, fixing, and restoring things that have been packed away for 25 years -- in some cases, kits not fully finished.

I'm also getting to know the recent Walthers Mainline SD60s and SD60Ms. So far, I've also installed Digitrax Power Xtenders in the 60Ms, although the newer "triclops" version has a speaker enclosure that's just enough different that it needs quite a bit of Dremel work to get the Xtender to fit. I've found that a loco consist with two Xtender-fitted locos and a non-Xtender one will do quite well around my layout, which has areas that are exposed to outside vents and thus can get very dusty in a hurry.

So here's the train I've been able to put together on a provisional basis, though each time around the layout produces new surprises until I can get everything tuned and adjusted. I think the 5-unit articulated sets are the hardest to get right. Below is the power set, all Walthers Mainline SD60 and SD60Ms. UP was very slow to repaint SP and CNW power after the 1996 mergers.

The first car is a 5-unit set of Walthers 48-foot well Thrall double stacks from the 1990s. I have three versions of this kit. The only one I was able to get running reliably for this session was this one, which I showed in my last post, with BN lettering. For now, I'm running only single stacks until I get things tuned and debugged.

The next car is a 5-unit set of 48-foot spine cars, also a Walthers kit from the 1990s.

Finally an Athearn bluebox Santa Fe 10-pack from the 1980s. I saw a lot of these railfanning back then, and although they were painted white, they almost immediately turned greasy black, which is how I weathered mine.

I'm starting to like this camera angle a lot. I need to finish the rocks and mountainside behind the train to finalize it.

Leaving Tunnel 6:

The power enters Tunnel 5:

I'm a little disappointed that Walthers numbered and striped the UP SD60s for the post-2000 or so period, although they don't come with ditch lights. And the second, "triclops" run comes with red sill stripes, which puts the paint scheme roughly between the early to mid-2000s, when the SD60s were renumbered into 2200s and higher, and 2010, when the sill stripes turned to yellow. I have very few photos of 2200-2400 SD60Ms with red sill stripes.

But at this stage, I just want to enjoy the locos, which turn out to be very well suited for my layout, and which I've railfanned now for over 20 years.

Getting Ready For Intermodal Virtual Ops

In last week's post, I talked about revisiting my ideas in Version 1.0 of this layout and re-booting my double stack modeling. It actually goes a little deeper than double stacks. Here are two photos from that layout (I was using print film in a very basic handheld 35mm SLR with predictable results at the time):

The locos are Bachmann 8-40Cs, upgraded per an article in MR. I still have these, a bit the worse for wear afte 30 years, but I'm going to bite the bullet and install DCC and get them back in service.

The Conrail locos are all Rail Power Products bodies, detailed for Conrail with the usual aftermarket products, and mounted on Proto Power West chassis. These were weighted and tuned Athearn bluebox chassis with can motors. I still have all three of these, in much better shape because they'd been living in display cases. I installed DCC in CR 6607 just a week or so ago:

I was originally going to install a Digitrax DH126 with a Power Xtender, but I began to realize that with the old Athearn chassis, the decoder and Xtender were just going to be flapping in the breeze inside the body, so I stuck with just having the DH126 flap in the breeze and will put the Xtender in a Walthers SD60M, where it fits pretty nicely in the speaker enclosure on a non-sound unit and won't rattle and flap. Here's an SD60M with one already installed:

I'll install DCC in the RPP-PPW C32-8s in coming months. I'm finding that the PPW chassis do very well with DCC, and they run comparably with ScaleTrains C39-8s, which is encouraging. Of course, these don't have lights, and I'm not inclined to want to create a wiring nightmare inside the shells with LEDs and resistors. But they'll be very, very good as trailing units.

Another old project I dug out was an A-Line model of the original SP double stack cars. This has had some dings after 25-plus years packed away, and I'll need to do some restoring before I can run it.

These ran from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s. At that time, I had work assignments in the Oakland, CA area and saw them in storage there.

On Not Taking Things For Granted

One of my objectives in building Version 1.0 of this layout at a different address was to run double stacks. I'd been interested in them ever since I started to see them railfanning in the early 1980s, and I was building some of the early kits for double stack cars from A-Line. When we moved to this house, I reassembled Version 1.0 with expansion, and one of the first projects was to add a then-new Walthers double track truss bridge where the newly extended westbound main crossed Zenith yard.

However, I discovered that two of the newer-style hi-cube domestic containers stacked together would not quite clear the Walthers bridge.

I'm not exactly sure why, but this put me off the whole double stack project for 20 years. Much more recently, Walthers offered a revised version of the double track truss bridge that would clear two hi-cube containers, but the problem for me was that I'd put a great deal of effort into superdetailing the 25-year-old one I had, and I didn't want to repeat that effort on a new bridge. So the double stack project stayed on the back burner.

I simply don't know why it took me so long to realize that much of the time, two hi-cube containers aren't stacked together, even on contemporary double stack trains.

You can see in this photo that the JB Hunt 53 foot domestic hi-cube container is riding on top of the COSCO standard international 40-foot container. I'm slapping my forehead for not figuring out that I could stack containers this way on my layout, and things would fit under the bridge just fine.

You can see that the hi-cube domestic container on top of the standard international container leaves the two together with plenty of clearance to fit within the truss bridge.

Two international containers together leave still more clearance.

The next issue was a lot of work I'd put into a 1990s Walthers double stack 5-unit well car set:

I added grab irons, steps, and air lines for the brake cylinders. When cars like this were new, I had a chance to climb all over one in the now-gone Bull Ring Yard in downtown LA. No way I was going to do without adding the neat details I found there! But then, some freight car "expert" of the kind whose rear end everyone is eager to kiss at prototype modeler meets wrote in to one of the now-defunct mags to say the number on the Walthers model was all wrong, and none of the prototype cars had the BN lettering on the Walthers model. Sigh. All that work. Just another reason to think double stacks maybe weren't that good an idea.

So not long ago I was thinking of revisiting my double stacks and wondering if maybe there was a way I could fix the Walthers set I'd detailed or live with the inaccuracy. For some reason, I went and checked an Excel spreadsheet of double stack cars I'd found on the web several years ago, looked up the number of the Walthers car, and what should I see but that DTTX 72152-72181 in fact carried the BN logo. So the Walthers model is correct after all.

So I learned yet again not to take my first conclusions about things for granted, and definitely take what the "experts" say with skepticism.