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.

Atlas Long Island C420

I picked up one of the most recent run of Atlas Long Island C420s to go with the older-run example I have in the bicentennial "wave" scheme:

The whole story of the Long Island C420s is pretty complex. A first class of C420s, eventually called L-1s, was delivered in small batches between 1963 and 1964. These had individual detail differences, rode on AAR standard trucks, and carried the gray and orange World's Fair paint scheme. They were leased from Alco.

A second class of C420s was ordered by the MTA, which had taken over the Long Island, in 1968. These were purchased from Alco and had hi-ad trucks and other detail differences and were classed L-2. The recent Atlas runs are of L-2 locos. The L-2s were delivered in light blue with yellow cabs, but by the mid 1970s were repainted in the "wave" scheme. A later repaint in blue and yellow used a darker blue. The L-2s had a higher gear ratio than the L-1s, because the MTA intended to get out of the freight business and use the L-2s for passenger service, which never completely happened.

The L-1s came off lease about 1976 and left the railroad, replaced with GP38-2s, MP15ACs, and SW1001s. The L-2s, which were owned, lasted much longer until about 1989. Both the L-1s and L-2s operated in all types of service on the Long Island.

The Atlas model of the Long Island units carries out the smoke deflectors, hi-ad trucks, and plows that made the L-2s distinctive. However, the rebates in the fuel tanks on the Long Island L-2s aren't reproduced. For moderately priced, moderately detailed locos, this is acceptable.

The bodies are fiendishly hard to remove from the chassis for decoder installation. Although online instructions for shell removal say to rock the shell back and forth to get it off the body (first removing the couplers), this didn't work for me. I was able to pry the body from the chassis by gradually inserting small screwdrivers and leveraging the body upward against the chassis, starting around the long-hood steps and gradually moving toward the cab.

The Kato N C&NW Bi-Level 400

I was eager to get one of these new sets, because I rode the remnant of the Peninsula 400 in late 1970, just before Amtrak. In fact, it was probably the last pre-Amtrak train I rode. I've been interested in these trains since I saw a blurb in a Trains magazine with mention that the C&NW had had Pullman rebuild a single-level diner with a false roof to conform to the bi-level profile of the Flambeau 400 and Peninsula 400 trains. The bi-level 400s wound up as pretty much the last C&NW intercity service, although I believe that by the end, they ran only as far as Green Bay, WI.

I also had a chance to ride C&NW bi-level suburban trains in the 1960s, and I remember being in a meeting in a Chicago office about 1967 and seeing from the window one of the bi-level 400s departing Northwestern Station complete with re-profiled diner. The 400 bi-levels were in a completely different pool from the suburban bi-levels and had different interiors. Kato has released C&NW E8s in C&NW paint in two numbers as well as cars numbered for the 400 trains in a set. They also appear to be releasing C&NW cars numbered as suburban gallery cars, as well as C&NW style cars repainted in contemporary METRA paint. While the C&NW cab cars have been retired from METRA, ex C&NW coaches remain in service.

I really like the Kato C&NW E8. These are heavy locos and smooth runners. I ordered the set with pre-installed DCC. The E8 is lettered in the late 1950s C&NW scheme without the horizontal black stripe in the middle of the body and with the nose numberboards blanked out and painted yellow.

By the time the bi-level 400s were introduced, the E8s had been rebuilt for head end power with diesel generators mounted in the rear of the body, with a porthole removed and vents added. This isn't reproduced on the Kato model. For N scale at normal distance, this isn't critical. The nose is painted with the older style C&NW silver winged bezel. Later, this was eliminated, and only a simple large C&NW monogram was placed under the headlights. Photos indicate that both styles appeared together during the 1960s. The overall effect is of the C&NW E8s I remember from the 1960s.

The set includes a cab car, but the bi-level 400s did not operate with cab cars. However, the cab car in the set gives a modeler a start on a suburban train of gallery bi-levels. The set that I got with pre-installed DCC includes an FL12 directional decoder for the cab car lights.

I especially like the red tail lights in the prototypical side mounts.

A note of caution: the horn on the cab car fell out in normal handling, an irritating feature of many preassembled models. Given its size, it's effectively gone forever. It would be smart to add a small drop of plastic solvent to hold it in place when you first take it out of the box.

Kato provides a model of car 903, which had 48 coach seats and 32 tavern seats (converted to snack coach in 1970).

The set provides two of the intercity coach cars, 700 and 705. Although there are interiors, there's no difference among the various configurations, and in fact I believe they represent the suburban gallery coach interior. Again, for N, this isn't important.

I had a couple of extra Kato lighting kits and installed them in the intercity coaches. They're easy to do.

The other car is parlor 6400. This is visually the same as the coaches. The prototype parlor was rebuilt to a suburban gallery coach in 1967, so the only unique feature on the model is the number.

The bi-level 400 trains appear on many videos. A full set of one running in reverse from Northwestern Station to the California Avenue coach yard is shown in the Green Frog Emery Gulash Chicago Odyssey Volume 2 Part 1, including both a re-profiled diner and the tavern coach about 1962.

Other videos show single-level RPOs running with bi-level cars on these trains. I found an old Atlas Rivarossi C&NW RPO on eBay that can work as a stand in:

Considering this model is about 45 years old, it's not bad at all. I'l.l probably just swap out a pair of Micro Trains trucks.

The consist and length of these trains varied widely over the years, from season to season, and probably by day of the week. Late videos show just two coaches, which I think was the consist of the train I rode in December 1970. That's what's currently on my layout:

Working With Some Alcos

I've found myself working on some Alco projects over the past week. One has been trying to get a pair of Broadway Limited Missabe Road DL600Bs to operate reliably on my layout. People have begun to recognize that sound-equipped locos are much more sensitive to dirty track or current variations than ordinary DCC. I tend to prefer DC-only for this version, but also because a sound-equipped loco is about $100 more expensive than a DCC-ready loco, and in addition, more than one or two sound equipped locos on a layout, even at idle, start to drive me up the wall.

The problem with a lot of Broadway locos is that they come only with sound, and that includes these DL600Bs. When I got mine on the layout, they tended to stall and hiccup quite a lot, and I wasn't sure how useful they'd be, especially in low speed service, which is where I tend to operate much of my equipment.

But these are fascinating locomotives, especially because the Missabe was almost completely EMD, but these are big, beefy engines that look good in the Missabe paint. But these were on the Missabe for only about five years, and they were sent to the sister US Steel railroad Bessemer & Lake Erie in 1963. Also, for much of their time on the Missabe, they were upstaged by the last of steam, and photos are pretty scarce. Here's one that was recently posted on Facebook:

I've kept plugging at getting them to run reliably on my layout. I've worked on keeping the rails cleaner with an abrasive pad, as well as running the locos back and forth with a track cleaning slider under a boxcar, putting Wahl clipper oil on the rails, and finding that with more running, the wheel bearings seem to get more polished, which improves contact and current conductivity.

So this is encouraging. I'm going to try running one of them on a local switch job in the coming week.

I've also begun installing decoders in some Atlas RS-1s. I'm not sure if the most recent runs have DCC sockets in the PC boards or LED lighting. I don't believe any in my collection, and I have a fair number of Classic Silver Series RS-1s, has any DCC friendly PC boards. I just installed a Digitrax DH165A0 in this Long Island unit:

I have two more RS-1s to go. Replacing the incandescent bulbs with LEDs from a DCC decoder gives a very satisfying bright headlight.