A Couple Of Cabooses

I keep an eye on Walthers sale items, which they make known either via the flyer that comes through the mail or on their website. I can often find bargains, especially for railroads that aren't directly in my sights, but which I follow with some level of interest. Both of the cabooses here are Walthers RTR items that came from the Walthers flyer over the past several years. They aren't perfect models of their prototypes, but they're "cose enough" for the $20 range in which I got them.

A Bessemer & Lake Erie car, with a diesel-style sunshade added per the prototype, as well as an ACI label:

A Missouri Pacific ex-C&EI caboose. I painted the truck sideframes red, which was MP practice, and added an ACI label:

Another AHM Rehab

The American Train & Track ore car, later brought in by AHM, IHC, and Model Power, was a prolifically produced model brought in from the 1960s until recently. Here's a stock version:

Around 35 years ago, I found a fair number on the used counter at a hobby shop. Although these came lettered for several ore hauling railroads, these cars are about a foot longer on the prototype than the Lake Superior style ore car. They were built for the Bessemer and Lake Erie, at least nominally for ore service between Conneaut, OH and Pittsburgh steel mills. Somewhat similar cars ran on Canadian Pacific, SP and UP.

A friend showed me some slides he'd collected covering a wreck on the PRR Middle Division with these cars mixed in (literally) among PRR G39 ore cars. US Steel imported iron ore from Venezuela beginning in the 1950s. I think this was transferred from ships in both Philadelphia and Morrisville, PA, farther up the Delaware River, and hauled by rail to Pittsburgh. This was the reason for the PRR G39s, and my friend's slides show the B&LE cars also ran in this service. I've found another photo of B&LE cars on the Erie Lackawanna at Marion, OH, presumably on a move from Cleveland to a Chicago area steel mill.

Floquil had recently brought out its Rail Brown paint color, and I thought this was very close to the color on the B&LE ore cars. Here's a closeup of one that I upgraded with new trucks and Kadees:

I used the Champ ore car set, which was a really good set. Both Rail Brown paint and Champ decals are now gone, of course.

I can't remember how many of these cars I upgraded. I've dug out half a dozen. Here's a shot of a cut:

Behind The Manhattan Transfer Roundhouse -- II

Here's what will now go in this area. It's a Bollinger Edgerly Scale Trains B&M-New Haven-Maine Central tower:

It's mostly complete. The kit isn't all that well thought out, some of it laser cut tab-in-slot, some of it more loosey-goosey, not intuitive and instructions not helpful. I had to figure out the colors myself. It looks like the B&M and New Haven used the same structure paint scheme through the 1940s, so I went with it after studying DVD video footage and photos on the web. Naturally, I also have to bring the scenery up around it as well.

Behind The Manhattan Transfer Roundhouse -- I

I'm moving beyond early memories, though I have others that I'll probably get back to later. But this week I've been working on the area around the Manhattan Transfer roundhouse. This was actually an afterthought, as in fact was the whole Manhattan Transfer terminal area (which is not based on the former Pennsylvania Railroad location, for what that's worth). The roundhouse is a Kibri plastic kit of a German prototype:

although it's very similar to many 19th-century roundhouses built in the US. For instance:

The area behind my roundhouse is something I've never been ready to finalize. Here's its current state:

The carbodies were meant to be kitbashed into something like a former SP structure that I found in 1996 in Suisun-Fairfield, CA:

There was another feature I had in the area, using decals from Bollinger Edgerly, a Boston and Maine reefer prototype from Boston's North Station:

The carbodiea will go, but the ice storage reefer will stay. I'll try to find someplace else to use the carbodies.

Modeling Childhood Memories -- III

I'm starting to realize I'm covering territory that another model railroad blogger has covered recently, why we like certain prototypes. Ralph V says, "It’s often been suggested that a lot of model railroaders prefer to create layouts that reflect their early awareness of trains." He especially likes the Penn Central as a result.

This brings me to a family trip that is even more puzzling than the one I mentioned to Roanoke, VA in my last post. Around 1955. my paternal grandparents moved to Lenoir, NC, where my grandfather worked for a wood chemical company in Hickory. Sometime around 1955 or 1956, a memory places me in a car on what I now realize had to have been US Route 421 southbound near Clinchport, VA, where I could clearly see a high steel railroad trestle with a lower timber railroad trestle paralleling it. There was a green diesel on the lower trestle, with the unique profile of an RS-3. (This had to have been the first RS-3 I ever saw, age about 8).

This was pretty clearly the well-known Clinchfield Copper Creek trestle, with the Southern Railway trestle below it. Another memory puts me later in the day in what must have been Kingsport, TN, because I clearly recall a concrete underpass lettered for the Clinchfield. At just about that time, I remember the sound of a 5-chime horn, loud and unique -- the first 5-chime diesel horn I ever heard. As an 8-year-old, I must have blurted something about how neat the Clinchfield Railroad was.

My paternal grandparents, I fear, were even more against my railroad interest than my own parents, and my grandfather, who was in the car, said something intended to discourage me. Didn't work, I guess. But if neither my father nor my grandfather was interested in railroads (and would have preferred that I like cars or baseball or whatever else), I'm left with the puzzle of why they appeared to have driven some distance through three states along the route of the Clinchfield, which itself was far away from either Lenoir, NC or New Jersey. I simply have no answer.

All I know is that this was my only sight of the Clinchfield in the flesh, and 60 years later, I still think it's really, really neat.

Modeling Childhood Memories -- II

My post about watching trains while driving to Florida with my family about 1960 got me thinking more about reconstructing those trips. I mentioned US Route 1 and US Route 13, but considering the towns in my memory and the fact that we often paralleled the Atlantic Coast Line makes me think we also must have taken US Route 301.

But there was another trip where we went through Roanoke, VA, which of course was a holy place for railfans. I simply don't know why we went through Roanoke, as it wasn't on a logical direct route from New Jersey to Florida. My father wasn't interested in railroads, and my parents were actually never happy about my interest, which they now and then actively tried to discourage, so it certainly wasn't due to any rail interest on their part. There may have been a business reason for the diversion.

We went through Roanoke about 1961, when I would have been about 13. Steam would have been very recently phased out, but I was less interested in that than in the ex-Virginian electrics, which were still running. I do know we went straight through town, presumably on US Route 220 or 221, and crossed both the N&W and ex Virginian lines at grade. (I could tell the Virginian line because it had catenary over it!) However, I didn't see any electrics, or for that matter any ex-Virginian FM diesels. I did see a consist of four or five black N&W RS-11s running light on the Virginian line, but that was about it. My parents let me jump out and snap a photo of the N&W depot, which I still have someplace, but they had other things to move on with, and that was all the railfanning I ever got to do in Roanoke.

I always liked the N&W, but since it ran east-west and we always drove north-south, I just got glimpses. I still model N&W as one of my "majors". Here's a Life-Like/Proto GP9 that I just installed DCC in today:

This model is about 15 years old. Although it has an 8-pin socket, converting it to DCC is more than minimal work, since the old Proto GPs had a problem with cracked axle gears, so you need to replace these on all four axles to get them to run well at all. You also have to replace the 1.5 volt incandescent bulbs with either 16 volt (my choice) or LEDs with resistors. So the whole job is maybe 2 hours, but the result is pretty nice. Here's the 710's sister, which I did several months ago:

A very early Atlas/Kato RS-11, which i got undecorated and painted and detailed for N&W. I converted it to DCC not long ago.

An Atlas Classic RS-11 in the later post-1964 "hamburger" scheme:

So I'm getting close to being able to run some of the four and five unit diesel consists that I wished I'd seen more of as a kid.

Swap Meet Update

I've made a lot of progress on the treasures I picked up at the swap meet two weeks ago. I tossed the trucks from the Roma Wine tank car, plugged the bolster holes with plastic sprue, built out some coupler mounts from styrene, and drilled both the truck and coupler mounts #50 and tapped 2-56:

Then I added weight, couplers, and trucks with metal wheels and touched up the paint. Here's the finished car:

It now comes in at 3.75 ounces, spot on for NMRA weight. There's a page on this car here. Actually, although the other paint schemes shown aren't prototypical, at least as far as I know, they don't look at all bad. I won't go out of my way to find one, but if one of those pops up at another swap for 50 cents, I'll probably take it!

Here's one of the three Roundhouse gravel cars I picked up:

The pivot posts in the coupler boxes were a little too big for the Kadees to be an easy fit, so I had to do a lot of work reaming both the couplers and the centering springs to get them to work easily -- but they finally did. Over the years I've found footage in various videos of operations in open pit mines, quarries, and so forth that shows industrial cars like these in operation. They mostly seem to be painted gray. I'll need to add numbers and heavy weathering to these down the road as well, but I'm not sure how I'll finally use them, except that I think they're a good match for "critter" diesels and things like the Bachmann 0-6-0Ts.