Another Ertl Gondola

N&W 17249 is another Ertl Collectibles gon. I really like the paint on these cars. I did the usual of replacing the plastic knuckle couplers with Kadee 148s and the plastic wheels with Kadee 33 inch flat back wheels.

I decided to put a Rusty Rails gondola junk load in this one. These are resin castings that come unpainted. I'm still working on this one. I sprayed it with a can of Tru Color Flat Aged Rust and then went over it with Tamiya Brown Panel Liner. I will then touch up separate details with a brush.

eally like the sharp, opaque lettering on the Ertl cars.

Working Through My Erie Lackawanna Backlog

In recent months I've been working my way through a backlog of Erie Lackawanna locomotives that I got in the 1990s that still need DCC. A number are Stewart/Kato locos. These were among the first HO F unit models that moved beyond the standard set by the Athearn/Globe tooling of the early 1950s, with a more accurate nose and roof curve, finer overall detail, and wider variations in headlight and roof options. They still neederd a lot of work, especilly handrails and grab irons, and the coupler mounts didn't really allow for prototypical spacing between units.

I spent some formative years in Chatham, NJ, on the Lackawanna's Morris & Essex Division. My family moved to the Washington, DC area in 1963, not long after the EL merger, and I was homesick for New Jersey for a long time afterward, thus I have a lot of EL models.

EL 7062 is an F3B, former Erie 706B. On the EL, these originally worked in sets of both ex-Erie and ex-Lackawanna EMD F units and ex-Erie Alco FAs coupled together; in later years, they could be found scattered more widely in consists. In my catch-up process, this one is low hanging fruit, since in my layout's original home, I had already converted it with the Kadee 450 set for Kato/Stewart diesels. Thus all it will need is a Digitrax DH165K0 decoder with no need for LEDs, since it's a B unit.

I have a couple other Stewart/Kato EL and DL&W units that will need more work. Although in the past, I upgraded a number of the Stewart bodies with Detail Associates detail sets for handrails and lift rings, these are no longer available, and I really don't want to do all that work any longer anyhow.

Updated Ulrich GS Gondola

Ulrich HO kits were high-end models in the 1950s, expensive, hard to find, and in comparison to Athearn, hard to build. They were out of my league at the time. Since then, I've run across a few at swap meets. This Utah Coal Route car was one of several I picked up at a meet and have been converting to contemporary operating standards.

This is how it looked when I brought it home from the swap. The pieces were all there, but:

One coupler was completely missing, and nothing was holding the other in place.

I tossed the one old coupler.

I decided to mill out the ends of the underframes of all three GS gons that I found using the cutting disk in my Dremel to let me install Kadee 148s:

Then I installed the Kadee 148 boxes with CA. When this dried, I used the mounting holes in the boxes as guides to drill #50 and tap 2-56 for mounting screws. Below is the finished car with paint touched up. I used plastic trucks from the junk box with Kadee 33 inch wheels. A 70-year-old model, it can now run with DCC and sound equipped locos and good-quality made-in-China freight cars.

According to Don Strack's Utah Rails site, the Utah Coal Route had 2,000 cars of a somewhat different design from the Ulrich model. "The Utah Coal Route name was in reality used only on these 2,000 cars and was a marketing scheme for coal mined in Utah and shipped to destinations on the Union Pacific."

These cars lasted to about 1960 and were replaced by hoppers lettered for the Utah Railway.

Tam Valley Booster And Circuit Breaker

Now and then on Facebook I see a post from someone on DCC who manages to run a loco into a live-frog turnout that's been set against the loco's direction of travel. Most of the time, this will cause a short that will trigger the booster's or the command station's circuit breaker -- but not always. If the circuit breaker doesn't trip, this will heat up the loco's wheels very quickly, and something will melt within seconds. It's happened to me several times, and as I've posted here, I've had to send to Walthers to get replacement trucks for the affected locos.

This, by the way, is te sort of thing that the extravagantly priced model railroad magazines don't cover. I gave my hobby budget a real boost when I droppped my subscriptions. You get Facebook with your internet connection, and I think it's a good deal.

Recently I saw a comment replying to one of those Facebook posts, saying that the best solution to the problem of DCC booster circuit breakers not tripping is to put a Tam Valley DAB002 booster between the DCC booster or command station and the layout. I've already been using Tam Valley Frog Juicers, which operate by having a circuit breaker that trips faster than a regular DCC circuit breaker, and when it detects a short at the frog, it quickly shifts the polarity before the DCC circuit breaker can trip.

The Tam Valley DAB002 is priced reasonably enough -- certainly lower than an NCE SB5 -- so I decided to give it a try. The Tam Valley documentation is sketchy, divided between a leaflet with the product and an entry on their website. It took me a certain amount of trial and error to get it correctly installed. Below is a photo of it on my HO layout:

The DAB002 is the green PC board mounted on the L girder on the upper right. It is meant to sit between the outrput of the NCE SB5 at lower left and the layout's DCC bus. There are 3 main ports, all on the right side of the board. The top port is the DCC OUT port on the right side of the DAB002. This takes the DCC output from the SB5 booster to the layout DCC bus. Unfortunately, it has two screw terminals similar to the ones on the SB5, when best practice for a DCC bus is 16 AWG wire, so you need to splice in short pieces of 22 AWG (yellow in the photo) to connect the 16 AWG DCC bus to the screw terminals on the DAB002.

The second port from the top is DCC IN. It takes the DCC input from the TRACK output of the SB5 via the blue and white wires in the photo coming from the TRACK output on the SB5.

The third port from the top is Power Input. This must come from a common 5 AMP AC-DC adapter that puts out 12-16 volts DC via a coaxial plug, typical of DCC power supplies. This isn't supplied with the booster. Tam Valley sells them, but you can find them more cheaply on eBay in the $8-10 range. The documentation doesm't make it clear that you need this for the unit to work.

When everything has been installed correctly, there are three red LEDs, one under each port, that should light up as shown in the photo. If the circuit breaker trips, the LED under the top, DCC OUT, port will dim to about hslf brightness. This is the only short-circuit indication you will get, and it will trip before the DCC booster or command station breaker trips. This means you won't get any flash or beep from the booster or command station for a short, as they won't know anything is wromg, since the Tam Valley breaker will have beaten them to it.

The documentation doesn't make it clear that the board with the LEDs must be visible during layout operation so you can tell if there's a short been detected.

I'm hoping that the DAB002 prevents any further melted gears on my locos. It has already tripped for one short before the SB5 breaker could trip.