Holiday Mail And Express

John R frequently posts about mail and express trains on his layout and his favorite prototypes. I like them, too. Some of my earlier serious railfan memories involve the Erie Lackawanna in New Jersey, which emphasized mail and express business after the merger. On one hand, I was sorry to see the old Lackawanna gray and maroon passenger trains sullied with dirty mail and express cars, but on the other hand, their grittiness was appealing.

Then my family moved to suburban Washington, DC, and there was even more mail and express on the PRR, not to mention the B&O and RF&P. I keep wanting to add regular mail and express to my layout operation, but so far, other interests have led to procrastination. But here is some equipment pre-positioned for this -- I have a regular switch job at my main passenger terminal that moves mail and express from the freight yard to the passenger platforms:

In earlier years, one of the easiest mail and express cars to model was the Santa Fe Fe-24, which is the prototype for the Athearn bluebox double-door 50-foot boxcar. The narrow panels to the right of the doors were unique to this class. Here are a few I've collected, some factory painted, some slightly modified and done with decals:

These had lots of variations in trucks, details, paint, and lettering. They ran all over the country. In fact, they had a regular assignment carrying Time magazine over the EL and Santa Fe from New York to Los Angeles.

Wait -- There Really Is a Gage Restraint Measurement Vehicle!

In my post from December 24, I speculated that the Gage Restraint Measurement Vehicle lettering on my Atlas track cleaner was fantasy. Nope!

Track Cleaning Extra

My layout is in a semi-finished basement, which it shares with a gas powered furnace and clothes dryer. In order to avoid carbon monoxide buildup, there has to be a certain amount of opening to the outdoors. (I worked for a natural gas utility for a while, and there's a formula for calculating this, which I forget.) Anyhow, even though the openings are screened, this means that there's a certain amount of unavoidable dust that's going to come in from outside, as well as dust that will fall from the ceiling, on top of ordinary corrosion of the rail.

So throughout the layout's history, I've experimented with track cleaning cars. One I've tried is the Atlas (video here). This hasn't attracted much enthusiasm on forums (if that's worth noting). I think one problem is that rotary abrasive disks don't actually seem to work very well as track cleaners. So I tried this one out and eventually set it aside -- a little sad, because it costs as much as a diesel. One thing I did was body mount the couplers, a big improvement.

The other day I decided to pull it out again. I had a defective DCC decoder on hand that would control the motor but not the lights. But this didn't have lights anyhow, so I mounted the otherwise useless decoder in the track cleaner's 8-pin factory DCC plug. This meant I could run it on high no matter what the loco that pulled it was doing. Looking at the Atlas video, I remembered it had a vacuum cleaner attachment. Although the rotary abrasive pads didn't work, I decided to try the vacuum cleaner again. Hmm, it works!

The version I got is lettered for the US Department of Transportation as a "Gage Restraint Measurement Vehicle", which was probably developed from the Mark VI Frammis.

I love it! But in the Atlas video, I noted the dust it picked up after just one trip around the demonstration layout. Here's my result after running over maybe 40 feet of my main line:

I now think this will have a permanent place in a track cleaning extra. Glad to get some use out of it after some years! It doesn't polish the railheads, but it picks up loose ballast, dust, bits of foam, and general debris.

The best track cleaner ever, at least that I've found, is the old Revell from the 1950s. I stripped mine and lettered it for the Santa Fe:

Vehicles

Here's a fun one from a supplier called Oxford Commercials. My wife found it on a side trip we took to Des Plaines Hobbies while visiting relatives in Chicago, and she gave it to me as an anniversary present:

Oxford Commercials is a UK die cast supplier. This is advertised as 1:76 and is presumably UK prototype, but there are lots of Indian-heritage people in California, and this isn't really out of place on a US layout.

Here's a Boley crew cab dump truck. I painted the dump body red, which matches most CN prototype trucks I've seen photos of. Then I added MG decals for CN vehicles:

With CN's expansion into the US by merging with Wisconsin Central, DM&IR, EJ&E, and Illinois Central, CN prototype is a little less regional or specialized. Here's a CN pickup I shot from the Amtrak City of New Orleans in deepest Mississippi:

Here's a Boley tree trimmer that I put CSX door decals on from decals made by an eBay seller. The conspicuity stripes came from the MG Decals CN truck set I used on the dump truck:

Since Walthers took over Boley and put its vehicles in their Cornerstone line, I think they may be missing a bet by not releasing them with railroad lettering.

A Couple Of Fun Purchases

I found a couple of good cars on sale at Walthers -- neither is in the swap meet category at just a couple of bucks, but in their favor, they have metal wheels and Kadee clone metal couplers, plus good contemporary paint schemes. With post-2005 conspicuity stripes, they match my current renewed interest in the prototype.

I've seen on DVDs that since former Conrail cars were lettered for NYC in the CSX split, this wasn't just a temporary move, and a lot of NYC lettered cars have received full CSX paint while keeping the NYC reporting marks. Thanks, Walthers! I lived in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC from 1963 to 1968 and really enjoyed railfanning CSX predecessors. Most of that time I was in college, so I associate the region with the holidays, and this car is special for that, too.

Walthers also did this car for BNSF. Again, the yellow conspicuity stripes are a great feature!

Most of these cars on BNSF are red,

But a very few are black like the Walthers.

Scenery Rework -- V

Yesterday I finished the plaster cloth hardshell in the project area. Here's an overall view as it stands:

Here's a closer view of some finished rockwork (I think almost 20 years old, some of the first scenery I put in) with the new hardshell above it:

This specific area is CP Drains, named after the station Drains, the lowest point on John Allen's G&D. Drains is also the lowest point on my layout.

Tomorrow I need to vacuum and otherwise clean up all the plaster dust and other crud! The hardshell will mostly be covered with rock castings of some sort, probably from several sources. I won't do much of this until after the holidays. Here's a photo I posted on a forum with posed WM-B&O Fs at the tunnel portal:

After watching my Green Frog CSX DVD set, I'm thinking hard about making the tunnel portal area and rockwork in the lower half of the project reflect Appalachian landscape, transitioning to more Rocky Mountain style scenery in the upper half. The differences will mainly be in vegetation, since watching the CSX DVDs convinces me that there's a great deal of more or less vertical rockwork in the East as well as the West. Naturally the "experts" will tell me I'm doing it all wrong once again, but I've learned it's never fun to have them visit anyhow, so they won't.

Scenery Rework -- IV

I picked up a Woodland Scenics triple roll of plaster cloth and am working my way through it -- this project will probably take up the whole roll. Here's the status of the hardshell as of today:

This is the other side of the mountain here. I'm still tweaking and pulling the cardboard lattice.

As I've said earlier, I make a little progress and then look at what the shape of things is telling me. This project will wind up connecting two areas of scenery that were already more or less finished, so it's a worthwhile bit of progress.

The tunnel portal is starting to tell me it's something C&O or N&W, which is fine, since the Virginian-coal mine area is just on the other side to the left. We'll see what develops!