The Life Like/AHM PRR A3 0-4-0

One of my early locos I started the hobby with after college was the Life Like/AHM PRR A3 0-4-0. This site says Life-Like brought the loco out in 1972 for a $10 retail price, which is about the time I got mine. It was made by Mehano in then-Yugoslovia. AHM marketed the model later in the 1970s for a higher price.

The model is based on the Pennsylvania Railroad A3 0-4-0, which dated from 1895. I detailed the one I got in 1972 and painted it for PRR. It was the main power on a small shelf layout I had in my first apartment, and I used it for several years. It's still packed away somewhere.

I would say that, even for the early 1970s, it was pretty marginal, though for $10 even then, it was at least worth the money. It had a noisy 3-pole mtor that was mostly plastic, and power pickup was only from the four drivers. I don't seem to have minded too much that I had to nudge it frequently to get over my switching layout when it stalled. It really isn't a serious option 50 years later -- it wouldn't be a bad choice for a new model designed from the ground up with pickup on drivers and tender wheels, 3-point suspension, and DCC control with keep-alive capacitor, but the 1972 model ain't that locomotive.

These turn up on eBay now and then, sometimes reasonably priced and sometimes not. I wouldn't buy one to operate at this stage, but if I see one at a good price, I'll pick it up for use in a dead line of scrap locos for layout detail. Not long ago I saw one in the $15 range, and the prior owner had removed the motor. (I'm not surprised, though mine lasted over several active years.) Here it is on my layout:

I intend to remove the lettering and paint it in variouis shades of rust and weathered paint. But since the previous owner removed the motor, the loco will coast, so I replaced the rear coupler on the tender to see how easy it would be to have another loco hostle it around.

Well, the Badhmann Porter 0-6-0T can pull it, but it has a lot more trouble pushing it, so I guess if I want to hostle it, I'll need something bigger.

More Building Flats

I've been working on a large view block made of building flats to try to bring some order out of chaos on the West Coast peninsula of my layout, again inspired by George Sellios, I put together this kitbash of Kingmill, Trackside Flats, and scratchbuilt building flats. As usual, I back up the flats with a 3-dimensional rear extension about two inches deep so they'll stand alone without needing to be placed against a wall. Now I've begun to assemble them into larger groups glued together with Elmer's Glue that can be moved around if needed.

The layout is in a semi-finsished basement. The view block does nothing to hide the HVAC ducts if you look upward, but it does hide less somplete areas of the layout The items in the foreground are still pretty disorganized, and you can see both European and US equipment. I hope to get this better sorted out in the coming year. Still, I follow several German YouTubers who mix European and US equipment as well.

Here is the Gold Medal Flour building before I got things better figured out into a view block. The billboard has also since been incorporated into another group of low-relief buildings.

This was inspired by a building on the Franklin & South Manchester. I took the idea, but I followed it only loosely.

I think Sellios and I started with the same thing, a set of ghost sign images on a forum. I printed them out on ordinary paper and glued them to a basic shape made from foamcore. I also printed the roof fom images of roll roofing on a texture site. I also got images to make up the ends from texture sites as well. Ghost sign and texture sites are a great source of model ideas and inexpensive raw materials.

Athearn/Roundhouse British Columbia Boxcar

I recently discovered an Athearn/Roundhouse BC Rail boxcar in the late scheme at MB Klein and ordered one. Here it is with wheels and trucks painted, new couplers, and graffiti:

It came with post-2010 conspicuity stripes. In the areas where the new graffiti covered the stripes, I replaced them with new stripes from Smokebox Graphics.

I was curiouis to see how close the model was to any prototype. I found that I'd shot two BCOL cars in the 100300 series at various times:

However, I don't have anyu shots from the 100400 series that this car is in. A check of the 100400 series on rrpicturarchives.net shows that these cars are smooth sided, unlike the 100300s, but they have one plug door and one sliding door.

Then I had a flashbvack. The tooling on these models is Roundhouse straight from the mid 1970s -- I did a couple in SP at that time when they were still Roundhouse kits. However, the factory paint at that time was so poor that I always just painted undecorated cars myself.

Thee cars sorta-kinda represented SP cars that I saw pretty frequently at that time. I think they hauled wine from Napa-Sonoma.

So this is quite interesting -- 45 year old tooling, with a paint job much improved from what was available in the mid 1970s. The only changes to the 1970s model are the brakewheel, improved trucks, metal wheels, brake parts, and the McHenry couplers (which still have to be swapped out for Kadees).

Although the car is just an approximation, I think it still works at normal layout distance, especially with the improved factory paint, along with graffiti.

The Bachmann Plus B23-7

I was going through my "purgatory box" of vintage models and ran across this old Bachmann B23-7. I was hoping I might be able to convert it to DCC. The HO Trains Resource website has a page on this model and says it was released in 1992 for $39.95. I got a few of these at the time, though I possibly didn't spend that much for them. (By contrast, the Atlas HO B23-7 dates only from 2005, so the Bachmanns were the only game in town at the time.)

I did a fair amount of work on this to bring it up to snuff. I added Kadees, MU hoses, plows, grab irons, a brass horn, fuel filters, bell, and a radio antenna. I also blackened the vents. From a distance, this is still hard to tell from the Atlas model, though the handrails and fuel tank are pretty crude.

This model also came in the period where Bachmann was beginning to upgrade its line. It had a metal frame, 8-wheel pickup, and a motor with flywheels mounted lengthwise driving worms on both trucks through a univerdal shaft. On DC, it ran comparably to Athearn bluebox.

But on my most recent attempt to convert one to DCC, I ran into a problem I had with an earlier one of these -- you haave to remove the motor from the frame to insulate the bottom brush for DCC wiring. As far as I can tell, the motor is assembled directly into the frame, and twice in a row now, I've discovered that you just can't remove the motor. In the process of trying to tease it out of the frame in one piece, it disintegrates into scraps of plastic.

I wound up removing the motor and the worm shafts from the trucks and turned this one into a dummy, since I'd put work into it.

Bachmann issued a B23-7 in its Spectrum line later in the 1990s. (My memory is that I saw Bachmann Spectrum HO diesels in stores about 1998.) This was a better quality loco with nickel silver plated wheels, and the motor was easier to remove. It was possible to convert it to DCC, which I've done. I believe the Spectrum version was available only in Missouri Paciic and Burlington Northern.

Installing The Bachmann Interlocking Tower

I received the Badhmann Lackawanna interlocking tower I ordered. The first thing I did was repaint the tiles on the roof a terra cotta green, which amny of the prototypes seemed to be:

Here's a prototype photo I found on the web that gives some idea of the roof color, as well as the actual concrete color:

It looks like I'm going to have to find some Aged Concrete paint and see what I can do to dry-bruh it to enhance the color.

In this post a few eeeks ago, I talked about prepping a scenery area in West Zenith for placing the new concrete interlocking tower.

Once I'd installed it, I tried out a couple of new photo angles on the layout that would feature it:

I'd wound up leveling half of a small hill, which was a blah scenic area with no particular interest to it. By creating a new point of interest in the tower, I think I've perked up a new part of the layout. I have to level up the tower, dirt it in, and reinstall trees and ground cover in the overall area.

Looking At The Bachmann Jersey Central GP7

I've known for several years that Bachmann has a version of their GP7 in Jersey Central paint. This is a loco from my childhood, as my grandparents lived about a block from the New Your and Long Branch in North Asbury Park, and when we visited, it was just a short walk to railfan trains at the station there.

But not long ago, I noticed that TrainWorld was clearing out its Bachmann Jersey Central GP7s, and I'd better pick one up, especially at the clearance price. The reason I'd hesitated up to now was that there's one important difference between the prototype and the model, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to deal with it.

The Jersey Central GP7s all had long hood extensions that housed electric generators for train lightibg:

Whereas the Bachmann model from the box just follows standard EMD GP7 features:

But leaving that discrepancy aside, I think Bachmann did a very good job with the paint and lettering. For innstance, I thought at first that the number beneath Miss Liberty on the cab side was too small, but I went checking photos on the web and discovered Bachmann had noticed something important: given the Jersey Central's standard lettering placement, the GP7 cabside numbers went between two louvers on the battery box doors. There was too little space there to fit standard numbers.

It looks like some GP7s got alightly larger numbers on plates welded to the louvers, while others may have had numbers the small Bachmann size.

For the train lighting generator, Custom Finishing makes part 213 for this in HO. You just clean up the castings, paint them, and super glue them to the long hood end:

The problem is what color matches the Jersey Central green (I think they called it Sea Foam Green). I've read that Chicago & North Western green is close, and I may have tried this in the past and liked it. However, I'm out of CNW green, and we're no longer in an age where you can just run out to the train store and pick up a bottle. I scrounged in the paint I had and discovered I had some Scalecoat Southern Railway green, which turns out to be at least an OK match:

Now I just need to scrounge a decal with the deep yellow "V" to apply to the end. I think I have an old Walthers set I can use. At that point, minimal weathering will cover any slight difference between the green shades. I also added a Custom Finishing 246 GP7 high hood bell to the short hood:

I notice that the Bachmann Jersey Central green is a good match for the green on the Atlas Jersey Central Train Master:

And Even More Scenery Work

I made a trip to the train store this past week and came back with a big grocery-size shopping bag full of Woodland Scenics items. The result is that the hardshell on the big promontory that surrounds the sewer pipes is about 90% covered, with work underway on rock molds and dirt surface, with vegetation starting to cover things.

I completed coloring the plaster rock castings on the East Coast scenery-based side of the pomontory. The part of the hardshell that isn't covered by rockwork has been fully covered with Sculptamold mixed with cheap acrylics.

The next step will be to add extensive trees and clump foliage to this general area, covering a fair amount of the castings as well.

The photo below shows clump foliage being inserted into the rock crevices in the Woodland Scenics Ready Rocks that have been installed. A great deal more remains to be done.

The photo below shows the remaining plaster cloth hard shell that hasn't yet been covered with Sculptamold or Ready Rocks. This will be the last phase of the project to scenic the sewer pipe promontory.

I added a piece of Masonite to serve as a base for the Bachmann Lackawanna tower that will be installed at West Zenith. This is on its way.

The next step will be to finish off the open9ng with plaster cloth and add a retaining wall to the cut-off part of the hillside.

Sprucing Up West Zenith

I turned my attention to the West Zenith area over the past week, mostly because I've belatedly taken up the project of replacing layout fascia that I'd removed when I replaced the DC block wiring with the 24 AWG DCC bus. Here is the fascia section replaced, along with the former DC local panel for the area:

The toggles are variously for a reversing section, cab assingment to blocks, and Tortoise control. In several cases, former pushbuttons for twin-coil machines had already been replaced with Tortoise toggles. However, this has pretty much all now been superseded, and the only electrical controls that are still used here are the red pushbuttons for Kadee electric uncouplers.

So in the near future, I will remove all the remaining toggles and cover the holes with labels that give the decoder addresses for the DCC switch decoders now in use.

But while I was starting this project, I ran across a Bachmann 35714 signal tower that had just arrived at MB Klein (Bachmann photo):

This is built up. It's a Lackawanna standard concrete signal tower. I grew up in part along the Lackawanna, and I always admired its architecture. It's reasonably priced, built up, and in fact less expensive than laser cut or urethane kits for the same prototype, so I had to have it. The obstacle was where to put it. Then I realized that if I cut away some hardshell in the West Zenith area, I could tackle this in the same project as reinstalling the fascia.

The hill shown below hadn't had serious attention in at least 20 years. It was dusty and beat-up, and it was scenically blah:

I measured the dimensions of the Bachmann tower given on the MB Klein website and realized that I could logically locate it here if I hacked away at the hardshell of the scenery and cleared out enough space for a base.

I used a Dremel with a cutting disk and an X-Acto knife.

I still need to clean up the area with the shop vac. Then I can cantilever over the open space with a piece of foamcore cut to size for the tower base and cover things back up with new hardshell from plaster cloth.

The Bachmann tower should arrive in a week or so.

Yet More Scenery Work

My layout area, while about half the size of John Allen's last G&D, has some similarities. It's in a semi-finished basement with a number of pipes and columns in challenging places, and since John Allen has always been an inspiration, I've definitely followed his lead on what to do with inconvenient pipes and columns.

The biggest problem has been a column surrounded by several sewage drain pipes. I've hated this area so much over the years that I see I've never taken a full-on photo of it in its natural state. But here's a view that shows part of the problem from 1995 in an early phase of layout constructon:

As you can see, track and roadbed dodge around the column and pipes. My basic approach was John Allen's, which I've used throughout the layout: cover the columns with scenery or tall buildings. Here is an example of a column concealed in a geologic feature called the Devil's Post Pile on the G&D, from a photo I found on the webz:

I've gradually worked my way into surrounding the pipes with a big rock formation. The track next to the wall in the top photo goes into the Moffat Tunnel on my layout. Here is that track seen from the opposite direction with more scenery work under way:

And work under way to create a big geologic feature to cover the whole horror, at least as much as it can:

Over several years of very slow work, I've covered things with plaster cloth and then added rock molds at variouis times. There's an added wrinkle to scnery work here, in that my idea is to have Eastern style scenery on the left of the mountain, and Western style scenery on the right. Here's the current state of the Eastern side:

My inspiration here is to follow generally locations in the Breaks Interstate Park in Kentucky and Virginia like the scene below:

Clearly I'll need to add a lot of clump foliage.

The other side of the mountain, with Western scenery, will be based on the Castle Gate area in Utah. Here's an 1898 color postcard showing the area that I found on the web:

I frecntly found a Woodland Scenics product, Woodland Scenics "Shelf Rocks" Ready Rocks, which are precast and prepainted plaster. I've used rock molds that I pour and add myself for many years, but these turn out to be a lot easier, and the rock pattern looks like something I can use for the Castle Gate side of the mountain:

I attach the Ready Rocks to the plaster cloth with Scultpamold colored with cheap acryics added and mixed with Elmer's glue. There's more work to be done, but now I have a basic plan of attack for finishing the area.

More Scenery Progress

The tobacco barn kit I started work on in my last post has turned out to be more intricate than I had previously thought, but I've made good progress on it. While the detail level, and the effort needed to complete it, is fairly high, it turns out that since this will be in a foreground area, the extra work will be worth it. I finished adding the mortar to the brick foundation and fire pit, but I sill need to add the door, lean-to roof, and roofing.

The last photo gives an idea of the context for the whole scene. It's going to need a lot more trees and shrubbery, but the basic ground form is now complete. I have a number of CSX, Western Maryland, and Norfolk and Western videos I can use for inspiration to finish the scenery.

Scenery Work

I mounted the kitbashed grouop of low-relief buildings from my last post at their final location, covering up an HVAC duct behind Egg Cabin in West Egg:

This gives me a whole new photo angle for taking pictures of equipment. Below is a Walthers Mainline New Haven GP9:

Then I moved to the Appalachian scenery on the other side of the room. I had removed most of the fascia from the layout in this area when I replaced the DC wiring with a 14 AWG DCC bus. It took me a while to put the fascia back in place, but now that I have, I've gone back to finishing some scenery work.

I decided to add a Rail Scale Models tobacco drying shed to a hillside I'd roughed out with plaster cloth. I built up an area to mount it with a piece of foamcoare, leveled out with bits of scrap foamcore and white foam. I used a circular level designed for turntables or cameras to be sure the surface was level in all directions:

I ordered a 3-pound bag of Sculptamold off eBay and mixed up a batch with cheap raw umber acrylic to build up a basic ground surface around it:

You can see the basic tobacco shed assembly in place.

I extended the Sculptamold ground cover to the rest of the scenic area on this hillside and will begin more extensive scenery work around the tunnel portal.

Finishing A Building Flat Kitbash

I ordered several more Trackside Flats building fronts, which I finished off with roarward extensions from foamcore that made them low-relief buildings rather than just flats:

The tallest one was already warping when it arrived, which shows how useful it is to add the extensions. I had had a Bar Mills mioltiple-panel billboard kicking around for some years, but I was never sure what to do with it. But this past week, I found this photo on Facebook:

A lightbulb switched on in my head -- I realized I had a King Mill low-relief building that in itself wasn't very interesting -- it was a row of back-alley buildings with boarded up windows, to which I had added roof materials. But it was a perfect surface to take my Bar Mills billboards:

At that point, a more complete plan began to come together. I built a stepped base from foamcore and sprayed it with Scalecoat Grime from a rattle can

I put the King Mill-Bar Mills kitbash on the lower level and backed it up with two Trackside Flats buildings on the upper level, plus one I'd scratchbuilt from a flat I'd downloaded from Facebook:

Here is the rear view:

And here we see the total width, 3-1/2 inches:

I'll mount it on the layout when the glue is completely dry.