N Scale Update

As I've been covering here, I'm revisiting N scale from the time I last modeled in it in the 1970s and 80s, when I mostly had a small N layout in a walk-in closet. One thing I'm finding is that it's harder now to find cars like those I used to see railfanning 30 years ago. The old reporting marks are gone, while contemporary cars are tagged and have yellow conspicuity stripes. Here are two recent cars I've managed to track down:

UP 93047 is a ScaleTrains Gunderson covered hopper just like those you can see all the time on the Union Pacific.

NS 465682 is a Micro Trains car that doesn't match anything I've found out on the west coast, but I've found photos of the prototype on the web that match the model very well. Notice that both this model and the UP covered hopper have the post-2005 yellow conspicuity stripes painted at the factory.

However, as I've said, my main interest with the N T-Trak layout is contemporary commuter and Amtrak operation. Here are two Kato Virginia Railway Express models. It's a shame that other east coast operations like MBTA, Metro North, the Long Island, NJT, SEPTA, and MARC aren't well supported in N, but VRE is appealing, and I lived in the Washington area in my late teens, so I like the photos and videos I see of VRE trains against Washington landmarks. A Kato MP36 refitted with a TCS decoder and Micro Trains couplers:

A Kato cab car:

An ex-Chicago METRA, exx-C&NW St Louis Car Company 6-window coach from Wheels of Time:

These cars were leased from METRA by VRE for early operations. They recently came off lease and went back to METRA. Some have reappeared on METRA still painted for VRE, while others have been partly patched for METRA again. I hope Wheels of Time will re-issue these cars in their METRA patch or repaint schemes.

I have a fair amount of N equipment left over from my N efforts 30-40 years ago. Here's a Roundhouse N boxcar that I repainted for the Southern then:

Here is what these cars look like now:

So not much sense updating it. I'm not sure why I gave it the number I did, but NS did renumber a lot of Southern equipment. The message here is that there's not much I can really update from the models I built 30-40 years ago to be close to prototypical now.

Here's a Soo Line gon that I added a load and an ACI label to back in the day:

Notice that it's missing a wheelset. That's OK, I'll need to replace all the wheelsets on my older models with metal ones. I also see that I never weathered the inside of this car.