Scenery Work In Malabar

This past week I got caught up finishing some scenery work in Malabar. I hadn't been completely sure just what part of the country it should represent, but I realized I'd always been inspired by parts of central California nd the Intermountain West, so I started looking in particular at railfan shots along the Utah Railway. Here's the tunnel portal area now, with semi-arid scenery and chaparral:

Here's a California style barn with a US Forest Service brush pumper running past it:

Here's the town and yard area in Malabar:

The station is a urethane kit from SS Ltd of a Rock Island style box car depot.

I still have to pave the roads and add a lot of other details, but I'm happy with these test shots.

Contemporary Model Rolling Stock And Golden West Service

As I've remarked here now and then, except for locomotives, it's fairly difficult to find rolling stock that's like what you actually see if you go railfanning at places like West Colton. But just recently I discovered Intermountain's Value Line. I've tried to find references to this on the web, but so far, I've been unsuccessful. This appears to be a reissue of some of the LBF/E&C Shops/Hubert's line of HO rolling stock, which I always liked.

What was good about this line was that it did in fact model freight cars you could actually see on the prototype, at least in the 1990s and early 2000s. Unfortunately, the line changed hands several times and eventually disappeared, but apparently is now resuscitated by Intermountain, assembled and painted in China.

I discovered that M B Klein was carrying a number of the Value Line cars. I was especially interested in the Golden West Service boxcars. What's really great is that these are in faded blue with SP reporting marks and number patches. Here's the one I ordered the other week:

All I've done to it so far has been to paint the wheel faces and the couplers Rust. The car comes with metal wheels and real Kadee 5s, which makes it a slightly better buy than equivalent Roundhouse cars, not to mention that the tooling is more recent and closer to prototype. For comparison, here's a recent photo of an equivalent prototype Golden West Service car:

You can see that the model has a paint patch with a new SP reporting mark and number. UP in this case is continuing to use the SP reporting mark. Here is an older car I have from E&C Shops (I think). Notice that, even though I've faded it some, the car has a much darker blue and VCY reporting marks. (YCY is the Ventura County Railroad, now part of G&W.)

Golden West Service was a late 1980s scheme whereby the Southern Pacific, financially failing, sold many of its freight cars to Greenbrier, which had Gunderson rebuild them, often to updated configurations, and leased them to shortlines that connected to SP, Ventura County and Galveston Wharves, and other leasing companies. Once the original leases expired, which would have been about 2005, the cars reverted to SP (now UP) ownership and had their reporting marks restenciled to SP, SSW, and DRGW, although it's still possible to find cars with older reporting marks.

The original Golden West Service paint from the 1980s was a much darker blue, but over more than 30 years, it's faded. So the Intermountain Value Line cars with faded blue and SP reporting mark patch would be post-2005. However, for my layout, I'll need to tag the car and also add post-2010 conspicuity stripes.

The recent Intermoutain car differs from the E&C car in that it has double plug doors, rather than double sliding doors. Checking photos on line, I find that cars in series SP 228000 do have double plug doors, but cars in 228500 and higher have double sliding doors. I'm not sure about the X-panel roof on the Intermountain car. Other Golden West Service boxcars, prototype and E&C model, have roofs with parallel ribs, but it's entirely possible that Gunderson mixed and matched when it rebuilt the cars.

Work To Do In Zenith

I mentioned in my last post that I discovered I'd found some lighting units I'd almost finished installing in Zenith city buildings on my layout, but apparently forgot about them before I hooked them up. But meantime, I'd converted to DCC and then discovered the Woodland Scenics Just Plug system. This had a couple of ripple effects. One was that I realized that the legacy lighting with incandescent bulbs on my layout was running off a 12 volt DC circuit that in fact had terminal strips I wasn't fully using. But if I wanted to run Woodland Scenics light hubs off those terminal strips, which would be a good idea, I should scrap the 12 volt DC power on that circuit and convert it to 16 volt AC to power both the light hubs and the legacy incandescent lighting, since the light hubs need 16 volt AC, while the legacy incandescent bulbs can run off either. So this I did.

So I finally hooked up the legacy lighting that had been installed in my Chinese restaurant. It brought the building to life.

The street and sidewalks in this area will be redone to let me install a trolley-interurban line in the street here, so things are a little messy, and the restaurant will need to be backed up half on inch or so.

I found some leftover Model Power incandescent lighting units in my junk box and will install these. The first one went into this old Walthers White Tower:

The bus that's approaching is a New Jersey Public Service Old Look GMC of the type I remember on Route 24 that used to be Main Street where I grew up. An upcoming project will be to light up the box office area under the marquee of the Magnusan theatre just up the street from the White Tower.

I need to do some touchup on Hill Street in Zenith and light up some of these buildings as well.

The buildings aren't completely straight. The one on the left is a Lytler & Lytler Iron Front kit. This was basically a box full of small white metal parts that built only the facade of a 19th century iron front building. The kit was sized to match Roundhouse modular brick buildings that you had to scrounge half a dozen of yourself to build the rest of the building. I added SS Ltd chimneys and a Blair Line radio antenna.

I finally have to do something about the cables on the Woodland Scenics backhoe in front of the iron front.

I built this from the old Woodland Scenics white metal kit of this model. It had elastic threads for the cabling, which eventually warped. I will simply replace these with brass wire painted black that won't warp.

Back To City Details

Not long ago, my wife gave me a birthday present of a Classic Metal Works Woolworth truck, which I finally got around to posing in front of the Woolworth store on my layout:

The Woolworth marquee was offered very briefly by Bar Mills. Apparently I was very lucky in getting it to go together correctly, as it was pretty tough to assemble -- it was printed on some kind of vinyl that you had to bend over a mandrel and hope it stuck in place. I'm glad I got it, especially now that I have the Woolworth truck to go with it. The Trailways bus was an offering by someplace called the Truck and Coach Division.

I've been doing some work on buildings in this area and discovered they had lighting that I apparently installed, but never quite finished the project. So I need to revisit this and also do some more detail work here. My wife gave me a Preiser Christmas tree sale lot for Christmas, and I think I can fit it into the foreground area here. But also, I need to finish installing a trolley-interurban track into the corner as well. So maybe there's going to be a resumption of city detail work in Zenith.