Good Weather

I didn't get too much real-world railfanning done earlier this year due to the weather, but this summer has turned out much better. One day not long ago, I got out to Commerce, where the Metrolink platform is one of the most underrated railfan spots in the area. Here's a pair of gensets pulling a cut of double-stacks out of Hobart Yard:

And just the other day, I got out to Cajon Pass in absolutely beautiful weather. BNSF had The Usual. Here's a ubiquitous Gevo on an intermodal:

Although I've got a lot of the rewiring project done, as it turns out, basement time is still going into electrical projects. I got into a groove, and while I'm in it, I may as well keep working. Here's a new Frog Juicer being installed to power frogs on some track that's been laid for several years but is only now coming into service:

And putting some signals into service that I've had on the to-do list.

The sooner I can work through all this, the better.

Railfanning And Models

Railfanning keeps me interested in up-to-date models. Here are some recent projects based on what I see when I'm out in the real world watching trains.

The first is a Walthers Mainline TBOX painted in red. I see them around pretty frequently, and I was happy Walthers brought one out, especially at a moderate price. Here's a prototype shot of RBOX 889410.

Below is the Walthers model. This will need to be tagged, and I also see that it needs to have a natural metal roof.

I also see quite a lot of cars lettered for CN subsidiary Duluth Winnipeg and Pacific. Here is DWC 409766:

Here is an Athearn model that isn't too bad, considering it seems to be an update of old Roundhouse tooling from the 1970s. The sides are pretty good, the ends are different. I don't like the color, but I can fix that somewhat with tagging and weathering.

Here's a pretty common type of tank car that I see a lot, UTLX 642270:

This was an older-run Walthers car that I updated with yellow conspicuity stripes. It also needs the yellow hazmat emergency label that's on the lower right hand side of the tank in the prototype photo.

A lot of the fun in modeling for me is going out and seeing the real thing that I can reproduce on my layout in my basement.

Gorre & Daphetid Combine 5 At The Zenith Chapter, NRHS

Friend and fellow blogger John R sent me a vintage Roundhouse kit for Gorre & Daphetid combine 5. This was promptly transferred to the Zenith Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society, where it joined the Chapter's collection, which is stored on the private trackage of the paper mill near Malabar. It's shown with the Chapter's restored Midvale Steel Porter on a recent open day.

Here is the "prototype" of G&D 5 serving on John Allen's G&D layout some time back in the 1960s. The Zenith Chapter did a great job of restoring the one they have to an earlier paint scheme.

The Los Feliz and North Western recently donated foreman bunk car 0357 to the Zenith Chapter as well. The Chapter intends to restore it one day, but this is far back on the list of the Chapter's projects, and the car will probably remain in the collection as-is for the foreseeable future.

(I found two of these Roundhouse old-time business cars at a swap meet, both for a dollar, so I couldn't pass them up. They were so cheap because someone had literally painted them with nail polish. I was able to get the nail polish off, but some of the windows came off badly, and I blocked them off and repainted both as work cars.)

The Chapter ran both cars for a short distance on the paper mill's private trackage, but as you can see, 0357 derailed. Luckily, it was a Sunday, and the problem was fixed wsithout disrupting the mill's operation.

Thanks, John R!

Updates

With the wiring issues heading toward resolution, normal operations on the LF&NW have resumed with JMRI switchlist, and I've had a chance to take some pictures. The first is the finished Walthers Parkview apartments that I mentioned last week:

This looks like it will be a good view block as I work to make more progress in this area. Next is an Atlas C420 in the Long Island bicentennial scheme:

And this inspired me to finish something that had been on my to-do list for a long time, a Con Cor gon that was painted in the Long Island MTA scheme by a third-party painter:

Here's a Walthers Thrall gon with a very nice Conrail paint job. Checking photos on the web, I see that CR lettered gons have lasted to have post-2005 reflective conspicuity stripes applied, but most have lost their can opener monograms. I weathered this one to look as if it's still in NS service.

Finally, after some struggle with vendors, I was able to locate a Walthers Bangor and Aroostook GP9 at a decent price. I added an ESU LokPilot 21-pin decoder, and it runs very well:

I have an older run Atlas GP7 that matches speed with it very well -- I just had to up the starting voltage of the Atlas slightly.

The variations on the cab color are prototypical. The exact paint on each loco in this late scheme seems to have varied, including which had silver trucks and/or fuel tanks.