Weekend Photo Fun - Dec 29th to Dec 31st, 2017

[Dave Vollmer]

I love all the narrow gauge this weekend!

I did a little weathering on a pair of Blackstone D&RGW 3000-series boxcars:

[HO-Velo]

Rick,  Thanks for opening the last WPF of 2017, your Evergreen boxcar is a beaut'.

Thanks to all the contributors for a great year of WPF and looking forward to yet another.

All aboard for a Happy New Year!  Regards,  Peter

[GP-9_Man11786]

The last WPF of the year. Where did 2017 go?

Rick, your boxcar looks great.

Allan, Your depot is coming along nicely.

Mike, The narrow gauge is looking good. On the protoype, those pipe would be bound for the Farmington Branch, right?

I managed to assemble this reefer icing platform:

[NP01]

Very nice pictures all! Middleman, I love the Western feel of the colors on your railroad. MikeL, very good overview shots. The color combinations in your layout feel just like mine ... Geographically I am modeling after a fictional Northern Cal/Oregon coastal areas which are greener than rest of the Western US.  Allan, much needed infrastructure improvemevts on the BRVRR, yes?

As we travel West on the FVR, I wanted to share a bench framing shot from the past to illustrate the discussion in Layout thread about box-frames. the entire section you see has no legs ... only cantilevers off the basement wall.

Traveling today, might post the usual westward progress later today. Happy New Year all!

 

[C&O Fan]

A pair of RS units on the New River Bridge

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[RDG Casey]

44 Tonner for the New Hope and Ivyland finished. Only a repaint needed for the project, and the decals helped fill up the sheet that had 40's. Kind of an obscure engine for the tourist line, not too many images are out there of the prototype for this one. Only really have a U30b left to do for the McHugh engines that got the full paint treatment.

[mlehman]

Mike,

Nice shots, I can imagine that roundhouse now...

middleman

Mike: If you're having trouble holding those cars,might I suggest O scale?(nudge,wink)

Hey, I my be old and shaky, but I'm not THAT old and shaky!

Yeah, just keeeeding. Have lots of acquaitances who have made that leap. I think they hit the sweet spot of time, space, and money at around the right age to make that happen and had not quite enough HOn3 to hold them fast. I've built way too much before that happened, for better or worse.

It's not really so much the hands but the eyes that are giving me trouble, though, so very glad I'm in the position of having a fully operational layout under the circumstances of life instead of a choice to make about scale/gauge. After all, things will still look fuzzy in On3, just bigger, so doesn't really solve my problem here. But I'm a stubborn old cuss and the lack of focus hides any comedy of errors my hands create in HOn3, so far.

And I now have the T&TC to get my larger scale fix...unless the snow's too deep. brrrr

[middleman]

Rick: Nice work on the "Evergreen" car.If I could get "only one" job like that completed each week I'd be thrilled.

Allan: Black River Station is coming along nicely. 

Mike: If you're having trouble holding those cars,might I suggest O scale?(nudge,wink) Those idlers look great with the pipe gon's. I like the overhead water shots,and the caboose is looking good,too.

Simon: I can't see your pic's,and I'd really like to.. I'll keep checking back,maybe I'll try another browser. EDIT: Pic's show up just fine on Firefox -Neat little engine!

Got busy on the 65' turntable this week.It's planted now,and works beautifully.A K-37 uses every bit of it.No indexing,but I'm running the motor through a TCS decoder,and it's easy to get it spot on. If I can find my video camera,I'll try to post a short video tomorrow.

Have a good weekend,

Mike

[mlehman]

Heh-heh...and it's not quite done yet.

Fortunately, the Hare is cozied away in a nice barn until warmer weather -- or until I get the motivation to build a snowplow. I'm going to guess the Shay could push it up Pain Hill of course. Probably won't happen this year, but there's only a couple of days left, even less in the balmy climes of the Southern Hemisphere.

There's always next year. I will probably get it done before the Cubs repeat last year's World Series win.

Not tempted to do much flying when the drone base looks like this (via CCTV tower cam)...

The worst isn't here yet, because the windsock is still hanging limp.

Things really get bad when the wind starts to blow and all the whte stuff tries to become airborne again. I'm waiting until morning to fire up the snowblower just to be sure that's not a waste of time. One benefit of rail-guided transport under such circumstances is at least you know where the path is, more or less. But this should help keep me to my New Year's resolution of building more rolling stock.

That and the -13 F Monday low, with a high of a balmy 2 F. Not exactly drone-flying weather.

["JaBear"]

[mlehman]

Simon,

Thanks for the kind words. That was back when we had to rub two sticks together to make rail, right? I remember that article! IIRC, it was an issue I read when dad was stationed in Germany, so I was familiar with the prototye.

Looks like the Telluride & Tin Cup is shutdown for the winter here.

[snjroy]

Nice work everyone.  Some of you may remember that I started working on a portable 2 rail O/ON30 layout.  That project is on hold until spring (-25 degrees in my garage right now...), but I worked on some rolling stock. Below is an O scale loco that I modified based on an old article I read back in the 1970s:

20171229_124135 by , on Flickr" alt="" />

It is an old Pola that doesn't run particularly well (the author didn't say that in the article!), but I always liked the looks of it. Here is what it looked like before the modifications.

20171229_123953 by , on Flickr" alt="" />

Simon

[mlehman]

Rick, Those Evergreens are classy cars, I always enjoyed seeing them and IIRC we even received incoming stock in them back in the day when my former employer still used rail for delivery of some product.

Allan, That station is coming along nicely. It's a good size building, too, not too big, but large enough to credibly load and unload freight into railcars.

Back to building models again after a hiatus. Finished up the idler cars that were only kit-bits in last week's WPF.

Gotta admot they're a little rough in spots. With my fat, clumsy fingers, it's not getting any easier to hold a HOn3 flatcar. Flatcars are a challenge anyway because there's reatively little to hold onto vs house cars and other more substantial rolling stock. What's really important is how they run and after some tuning before final details and paint/decals, they run well.

In the last pic, you can see I still am running some MT HOn3 C&S flats for idlers, which I have been using along with some Blackstone Rio Grande flats. I'll be able to switch those cars back into revenue service as I build more idlers from kits.

I also started on my Sparrows Point Division DSS&A caboose. It started like this.

Got it about this far.

Might have it finished for the first WPF of 2018.

[BRVRR]

Thanks for starting off WPF Rick.

A little progress on my new Black River Station. I installed the roof supports (Knees) with thick super glue. So far so good.

Keep the photos and ideas coming everyone. Thanks to you WPF is always the best thread of the week.

[dti406]

Guess I am first this weekend, this is a place to show your completed and uncompleted projects for the past week. Thanks for all who participate.

Only managed to get one car done this week:

Athearn 50' PC&F RBL with 10'-6" Door, painted with Scalecoat II Hunter Green and Floquil SP Dark Lark Gray.  In the mid 60's the SP was having trouble getting its cars back to haul wood products out of Oregon and Washington so with their bank they created Evergreen Freight Car as private owner cars were routed by different rules and payment requirements than railroad owned cars.  Evergreen eventually had over 3,000 cars. This arrangment lasted until 1978-79 when the cars were absorbed into the SP under class B70-38.

Since I only got one car done this week, thought I would show some of the stuff on my workbench.

Kadee 40' PS1 Boxcar, painted the first color and masked for the next color to be applied.

Atlas 3560 CF Covered Hopper Kit, removed the reinforcing rib on the top of the car as the ICG cars did not have this rib, removed the cast on roofwalk and am in the process of placing the supports for a Plano Roofwalk. Also will need to add airlines where needed.

This ECW ACF kit, is being modified to more closely represent a Bethlehem Steel manufactured car as denoted by the white sheet metal parts that were present on a Bethlehem Steel car and the longitudinal opening hatches.  Will need to add airlines and other parts.

Thanks for looking!

Rick Jesionowski