New Walthers Mainline SD60 Review

As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to order one of the new Walthers Mainline SD60s. Walthers says these have new gearing and truck sideframes from the Life Like/Proto SD60s they're based on. I ordered the DC, DCC-ready version. I like sound, but too much of it, from my point of view anyhow, can drive you up the wall.

I was flying blind on my order from several points of view. Walthers really isn't consistent from marque (i.e., Proto, Mainline, Trainline, etc) to marque, and even from run to run within the marque (e.g., GP60) on DCC adapter socket and lighting features. I had sort of anticipated that these units would have ditch lights equivalent to the new Mainline SD70ACes, but they don't -- they just have a high headlight. Also, unlike some Proto units, although the number boards light, they aren't separately controllable. Here's the chassis showing the light arrangements, just a single LED:

The DCC interface is a 9-pin. Since the headlights are controlled by single LEDs front and rear, a Digitrax DH126 is a good choice. It fits very nicely on the chassis.

Here's the effect with the headlight lit:

Here's a better view of the loco:

With the 2000 series number and yellow frame stripe, these are best used for post-2005 and in local service. From that standpoint, it's a little unfortunate that they don't have ditch lights, although in local service these aren't always used. On my roster, this will run best with Kato SD9043MACs and Atlas Trainman gensets. Both of these have ditch lights, so I can use their ditch lights if the SD60 is trailing. I made a test run in a consist with a genset:

The genset runs a little faster than the SD60, but with speed matching in DCC, this should be easy to adjust. I'm going to put up another post soon on speed matching.

These locos are robust, smooth runners, with very good weight.

Empire Belt Hopper

Fellow blogger and modeler John R and I have exchanged custom decals for our respective model railroads. After considering possible cars to letter and running some ideas by John, I decided on doing a Mehano-IHC quad hopper, upgraded and with paint stripped. John gave me the number series for ribbed cars, and here's the result:

Partly because the car has missing steps, and partly because it's fun, I added a HOME FOR REPAIRS DO NOT LOAD stencil from a Microscale set:

This won't affect how I operate the car, it's just a feature I add to cars now and then.

Once I finished the car, it began to remind me of the various miscellaneous old quad hoppers that turn up frequently on the UP, lettered for CNW, MP, CTRN, and other owners. I'm realizing this would mix in pretty well with other quads on my layout.

New Walthers Mainline SD60s And SD60Ms

I see that the new Walthers SD60s and SD60Ms have arrived. I'm especially interested in the UP versions and will probably get at least one. These were common in California throughout their lives, and after the SP merger, they were even more so.

Both of the UP versions have yellow sill stripes that replaced the red ones starting about 2005. The standard-cab SD60s didn't last all that long ith yellow sill stripes. Here's a red sill stripe one from 2004:

Here's one with a yellow sill stripe in 2015, about the end of its career:

Oddly, the Walthers SD60 model has the lightning stripe scheme, but none of my standard-cab SD60 photos shows this.

The Walthgers SD60M has the late two-window cab. Here are some photos I've taken:

By this time, these locos were pretty much in local service in the Los Angeles area. A lot more of these had the lightning-stripe scheme, but oddly, Walthers has brought these in with the older straight gray band.

Here's a 2012 shot with a loco still mixed in with newer road power:

But here's one of the last I saw, on a Chicago-area mainfest:

This was in late 2015.

Reopening The Main Line Through West Zenith

With the major project of rewiring the Zenith Sub finsihed, I'm cleaning thing up in order to reopen the main line for full operation. Below is a test run on Main 1 past City Coal and the Zenith Knitting Mills. The switch at left is CP Conn.

I need to pay a lot of attention to CP Weat Zenith, which marks the end of the Zenith Sub. A lot of the ballasting was done with Woodland Scenics 20 or more years ago and needs a lot of touching up. The Clinchfield ballast car is a reminder of all the ballast work I have to do. The signal gantry is crooked and needs to have that fixed and a broken wire repaired.

The two shots below show how the old ballast has had to have shims added over the years and needs to be touched up.

CP West Zenith never got a switch machine or a relay shed. While it has a propane tank, it also needs a switch heater.

Here is WP 709 with a WP track cleaning car.

Train DVDs And Early N&W Diesels

There were several railroads that were hard for me to railfan as a kid growing up on the east coast (my family moved to California, as a practical matter not long after I got my driver's license, since I went away to college about then as well). One was the N&W, which until the 1964 Wabash-NKP merger was hard to reach at all, and after the merger basically just occupied flyover country anyhow. So maybe because of that, it always fascinated me, not just for the steam, but for the interesting diesel operations.

DVD railfan footage has been just as hard to get for the period roughly 1957-1970. Emery Gulash has some N&W shots in the Penn Central Volume I Part I, and also in later shots on his Wabash DVD after the merger. Green Frog has some other DVDs with N&W material from this period. I get everything I can!

Here are some recent acquisitions. First, Walthers was clearing out its last run of GP30s, ans one turned up on line at an excellent price.

I found an Atlas/Kato yellowbox C425 in N&W blue for a very good price on eBay:

I installed DCC with a Digitrax DH165A0 and replaced the incandescent headlight bulb with an LED. These yellowbox centuries run beautifully and can be great bargains on eBay.

Here's an older Atlas Trainman RS-36 that I recently installed a decoder in:

Blast From The Past

I was going through the great swap meet we all have in our closets and pulled out some items that had been packed away since we moved into this house about 25 years ago. Here's a photo of the layout I was working on in our former place:

The locos are Rail Power Products kits on Proto Power West chassis. None has been converted to DCC yet, but I still have them. The benchwork in view was moved to our current place and is part of the current layout.

Here are some Con-Cor hoppers that in fact may have been in the train behind the Conrail locos. I find they were optimized for my current style of operation, with low-temperature alloy poured in the crevices in the underframe to add weight, Kadees mounted with screws, and metal wheels:

Here's a Roundhouse RBL car whose prorotype I saw pretty frequently in the 1980s and lettered with Microscale decals:

I think these hauled mostly wine. Here's a prototype shot. The model is very approximate, but it was the best you could do in the 1980s without major kitbashing.

Reopening The Oak Hill Branch

During the rewiring project, I wound up having to move a lot of stuff aside, and because it was convenient, a lot of it got put into the area where the Oak Hill Branch is located.

Naturally, I've got to clean a lot of this off. At the same time, I decided to make things a little easier to operate by installing a Throttle Pocket on the fascia:

Throttle Pockets or equivalent have some real advantages. They keep the scenery a little more protected by providing a definite place to put the throttle. They also make it a little less likely that the throttle will be knocked off the layout and be damaged.

Although the Eastern Division, Zenith Sub main line was converted to DCC stationary decoders, the Oak Hill Branch is keeping toggles to control Tortoise switch machines:

I had to do track cleaning and re-railing of equipment:

My Bachmann Interstate RS-3 is a regular on the Oak Hill Branch. I used it do to the switching work involved with repositioning the cars:

There's still work to do, but at least I can now run a train to serve the mine: