Lockdown Projects: Improving The Atlas Austria FP7

The Atlas Austria FP7 dates from 1975. This was a big improvement for its time over the circa 1950 Athearn/Globe F unit tooling. It was re-released in 1990 with some body detail improvements, a heavier frame, and a new motor, as well as improved paint. The 1975 loco sold for $25. The 1990 one sold for $99.95, which was pricey for its time. Both versions are now in the vintage category, since several manufacturers have since brought out F and FP units with better detail. However, the 1990 locos in particular are still good layout models, with good weight, and they're smooth runners. The DCC install is at the "advanced" level, requiring cuts in PC board traces and soldering in a hardwire decoder.

I have several of these on hand. I decided to work on converting them to DCC and doing what I can to make them look a little better. The biggest defect in appearance that can easily be corrected is the numberboards, which are clear plastic and stick out at an unrealistic angle. I decided if I could paint these and add numbers, it would make an overall difference in how the model looks. I also had some Microscale 87-793 F unit data decal sets on hand, which would give me decals to add step kick plates and the numberboard numbers. The step kick plates would also be subtle improvements.

Here is a 1975-run Soo Line unit I found at a good price on eBay with DCC installed not long ago with kick plates and numberboard numbers added. i had previously also painted the grills silver and touched up the skirts and steps with black:

For comparison, here's how it looked when I got it:

This will be an ongoing project, with the next steps being a winterization hatch and weathering. These lasted into the 1980s on the Soo and were pretty beat up by that time.

I found a 1990-run Soo Line body on eBay pretty cheaply and installed it on a chassis I had on hand. Again, I added kick plates and numberboard numbers.

This will also get a winterization hatch when the lockdown ends and i can go out for glue and paint. The 1990 run locos had their grills already painted silver.

Here is a 1990 run CP loco that I added a Juneco CP style winterization hatch to when I got it. I added the kick plates and numberboard numbers. The loco has been pretty beat up over the 30 years I've had it, and it will get weathering.

With all these locos, I think small changes in paint and detail distract attention from their less-good vintage features. I really like the way they run.

Lockdown Projects: More Scenery

One thing I've discovered is that Sculptamold, an inexpensive and very useful scenery product, is harder and harder to find. You can't find it in local hobby shops any more around here, and you can no longer get it at places like Michael's, either. I tend not to think of it as something to order on line, but things change, I guess, and since I can't go out anyhow, I ordered a 3-pound bag off eBay and made some good progress with it on scenery. I mixed it with some acrylic pigments I got on sale at Michael's not long before the virus.

Here is some scenery surface I added in the German part of my layout:

I posted this in the German Model Railways Facebook group and got some good advice on relocating the counterweights in front of the signal cabin more realistically.

I installed a Bar Mills Bull's Salvage and added some junkyard castings from various sources:

I was inspired by a 2012 visit to this junkyard in Chemurgic, CA:

This is actually something of a railfan destination, since at least at the time, it had some ex SP SD9s tucked away in back.

Finally, I made some progress on the East Slope climb to Moffat Tunnel, "dirting in" some Mountains in Minutes rocks.. Here's the Before picture:

And here's the After:

Now I can start to add talus, other ground cover, and vegetation. However, although this segment had been removable up to now, it looks like the added weight of the new scenery means it'll have to remain in place from now on.

Breakin Run For A Walthers Mainline GP9

I ordered a Walthers chop nose GP9 for Chiago & North Western, which is one of the railroads I like to model. The cost benefit of the Mainline locos with sound decoders is very good. The price on line for a DCC ready loco without decoder is in the $100 range. The price of a loco with sound decoder is in the $150 range. If you consider that a non sound DCC decoder will be in the $25 range plus another $10 shipping, plus the trouble of installing, the premium for a Mainline sound loco is trivial.

Below is my loco with a caboose:

I ran the loco and caboose on the Sunkist Turn, which is a shove from Manhattan Transfer to Sunkist. The train is made up on Track 2 in Manhattan Transfer. The loco and caboose backed into position for the shove:

Here it is setting out and picking up in Sunkist:

Here it is returning to Manhattan Transfer with the pickups, crossing the drawbridge over the aisle.

These locos are very smooth running and outstanding at very slow speed switching.

Lockdown Projects

With a lot of enforced time on my hands, I;m turning to projects that had been on the back burner. It's an opportunity to get some of these done. The first is an Atlas Roco 1990s run FP7. Like the Austrian and early Chinese Alco switchers, these have good weight and are good runners, but they aren't easy to convert to DCC. I went looking around the web and found some hints, but I eventually came up with my own formula.

I retained the PC board but cut the traces to isolate the track pickup leads from the motor and headlight leads. Then I soldered the wires from the Digitrax harness to the isolated traces on the PC board. I left the incandescent headlight in place, mostly because I didn't have a resistor for an LED. Here's the chassis with the decoder installed:

Here's the shell remounted. About 20 years ago, I had added lift rings, grab irons, and a new horn to the roof. I also added Microscale decals for the step kick plates. This loco had a fair amount of running on my layout before I converted to DCC. It really isn't bad looking at all for a vintage unit. The die work is mostly from before 1980 and is one of the earliest Atlas Austria locos. However, the chassis is all new as of 1990.

Here's how the incandescent headlight lights up.

Another project I got to this week was a white metal conversion kit from the 1980s that was meant to convert an Athearn bluebox boxcar kit to a Bangor and Aroostook woodchip car. I had completed about 95% of the work but put the project on a back burner. I had all the items on hand to complete it, which included Highball Graphics decals and a bottle of old Floquil Jade Green.

I got the paint on over the past week, but normally you have to wait until all the volatiles evaporate from the paint, and for some reason, it's taken quite a while for the smell to go away. Hopefully I can get the decals on in the next few days.

More On The TCS AS6 Decoder For Old Atlas Alco Switchers

I used my share of our tax refund to send for another TCS AS6 decoder, this one for a favorite loco, an older Chinese S-2 lettered for CP Rail. I think this dates from about 2000. Once Digitrax and TCS discontinued their earlier Atlas Alco switcher decoders, I wasn't sure if I would ever get to converting this one to DCC, considering the level of difficulty a wired DCC decoder was in thee locos without specialized versions.

Here's my CP Rail S-2 some years ago as an analog loco:

A new drop-in decoder would go in this loco. I was delighted that the eBay seller for the new AS6 got it in the mail right away, and although major retailers are shut down with quarantine, I got it in the mail within a few days.

The PC board for the new AS6 is lettered "Rev 1".

One thing I discovered installing this new example of the AS6 was that the piece of plastic under the rear headlight LED is not a casting, it's a piece of foam. In this case, the foam was slightly dislodged in shipment, and I wondered if it was meant to be just a protective insert and not a permanent part of the decoder. So I removed it. Here's what the install looks like without the foam:

However, when I re-mounted the hood and cab, it became clear that the black foam is intended as a light block, and without it, the rear LED lights up the whole cab:

So I went back, retrieved the piece of foam, and reinstalled it:

Here is how the foam light block works with the cab in place:

I find that there are actually several variations on the early Atlas Alco switchers. This one is very smooth and quiet, with a skew wound armature. I think it's the best one of those I have, and I'm delighted TCS reissued the AS6.

Again, the TCS AS6 install is fairly quick. The most time-consuming steps are cutting the tape to insulate the two frame halves and soldering the power leads from the trucks to the decoder board. Total time is probably less than 20 minutes.

Scenery Work

With lots more time on my hands, I've been working on scenery, for which I have enough material without the need to run out. I certainly hope our local train stores survive this crisis. Meantime, I'm working on time-consuming projects that I hadn't been doing when I had others that nevertheless required trips out.

The biggest one is installing trolley-interurban tracks in Lake Street in Zenith. When I built it, I used modular cast plaster city street products from Easy Streets. I don't know if they're still around, I started the whole city scene here 35 years ago. The point of Easy Streets was that the modules extended from the sidewalks (indluded) to the center of the street. The streets in turn were sized to allow you to lay track in a space between the facing modules.

I fully intended to do this when I first started Lake St, but soon enough I realized that HO trolley models won't take the curves you would normally have at city corners -- in HO, maybe 6 inch radius at the outside. So although I glued the City Streets modules down with a gap between them that would have allowed a single track down the middle, I shelved that idea and instead filled the gap with Sculptamold. Then a couple of years ago I rethought the idea and realized that although I couldn't put in right-angle turns at the corners, I could in fact using 15 inch radius sectional track run something down the middle of Lake Street and transition it off onto private right of way.

So I began chipping away at the plaster and Sculptamold. Here are progress shots.

When the track is laid, I'll surface it with spackle, clean the railheads, and carve in flangeways. This will wind up allowing me several feet at least to run a few trolleys.

I also put some finishing touches on the road crossing and surrounding scenery at Sunkist:

The house is a farm house kit that was briefly available from Walthers about 1990. I think it was made by the German firm Faller, and I don't think it was ever reissued, although similar houses are also now available from Walthers.

New TCS AS6 DCC Decoder For Older Atlas Alco Switchers

Not long ago, I turned my attention to the remaining Atlas Yellowbox and Classic Alco switchers in my collection, hoping to convert the rest of them to DCC. These were great locos, good runners with a lot of weight, and pretty inexpensive, especially at discount. Their defect, as I've posted here, is that they had no DCC socket, and DCC conversion was the installation from heck.

There were three options, none of them good, all of them with the potential for smoking the decoder. NCE and TCS both had decoders specifically for the Atlas Alco switchers, but the procedure involved removing the motor, insulating it from the frame with tape, replacing the metal motor mount screw with a plastic one, reinstalling the motor, which included reconnecting the universal shafts, insulating the top weight, and then reassembling the chassis before mounting the new decoder.

You could find instructions on the web for installing a small wired decoder in the loco without using a specialized one, but you had to cut the traces on the PC board, and all the other steps were the same.

In every case, if you weren't careful and reinstalled the motor upside down, you smoked the decoder.

Although both the TCS and NCE decoders provided LEDs for lighting the rear headlight, you had to bend the leads to reach the rear headlight at the top of the cab, which was one more crazymaking step. Both NCE and TCS withdrew those decoders pretty quickly, I'm sure because they had so many warranty claims.

Wile I was searching on the web for any new info on DCC installs in the Atlas Alcos, I discovered that TCS has issued a new AS6 decoder. I sent for one, but the icing on the cake turned out to be that they'd revised the install procedure for the new decoder, and you no longer need to go through the business of removing and insulating the motor and reassembling the drive train. You just remove the top weight, insulate it, and install the new AS6. A 30-minute job at most now, easy-to-intermediate, about the same as installing a drop-in decoder in a Kato N loco.

Here is my Reading S-1 with the new AS6 installed:

Another great new feature is that the rear headlight LED is preinstalled with a plastic piece to protect it. Thus the old Atlas Alcos have operating rear headlights with the upgrade.

The new AS6 decoder is in the $50 range. While this is expensive for a non sound decoder, the original locos I think could be found in the $30 range, so a loco with full DCC is still reasonably priced. A check on eBay shows Atlas Yellowbox S-4s in the $40 range, although if I wanted an Alco switcher that badly now, I think I'd go for either a Bachmann or a revised Atlas with a DCC socket.