Weekend Update - March 25, 2007

[3rdrail]

'Tis Sunday again, so please share what you've been up to on your model railroad or railfanning this past week. I got a bunch of photos taken of various weathered cars for the "How do YOU weather..." series on The Railwire and started work on a Mark4Design PRR X23 boxcar. I noticed the car lacked sill steps and some grab irons so emailed Mark for suggestions and am waiting to hear back. Very unusual manner of breaking the body down into parts to be assembled, but it works well!

Also, got my two PRR USRA rebuilt boxcars by Atlas from FRTS. Atlas has another winner. 

I also figured my income taxes yesterday.  > > :'( :'(

[SirTainly]

I finished my photo diorama, and managed to squeeze in a few shots on it before the sun dipped below the trees at the bottom of the garden.

[atsf_arizona]

SNFF 2007 03 25

Here's my contribution for this week.

I've been spending good part of this new year learning to weather
passenger locomotives and cars.  It's a different, more challenging
task than freight locos, especially for a railroad like Santa Fe that
prided itself in keeping their passenger locos clean.

Part of the challenge is that in keeping the weathering subtle, also
means that after I'm done, it is not that obvious by looking at the
model, to see where all the time went into doing subtle weathering
on one of Santa Fe's 'clean' F7 Warbonnets!   


Here's some pictures.

A 'before' shot of a N scale Kato Santa Fe F7 in Warbonnet:




An 'after' shot....




Here's the differences pointed out:




To me, the differences are really only noticeable when seen side by side.
And takes me several hours to do up one of these F7s.  But my modeling
eyes and perfectionist nature just cannot resist doing the weathering. 

Enjoy, and have a good week!

[Ian MacMillan]

I finished up my benchwork article for Railroad.net and changed some of the plans for the layout. I ended up eliminating 12' linear feet of benchwork that I think will make the layout run better, and make the room more comfortable. The removed benchwork will allow my wife to have a 4' space in front of the washer/dryer instead of the 30" that was there before. This also allows the yard at Winnisquam/Concord to become 3' deep and allow for more work there, and also makes the aisle between the yard and Mountain view 5' wide instead of 3'.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

My weekend modeling mostly consisted of purchasing and photography of the new purchases:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ed.kapuscinski/AtlasGP38AndGP382ComparisonFullSize

Here it is, and Atlas GP38-2 with an older GP38 in the background for comparison.

[Chris333]

A week further on my HH660:




The hood is a piece of brass that I etched rivets into. They are indents and not "bumps", but I will live with it. The doors are from BLMA with the latches removed. The grabs and louvers are also BLMA. Everything else is a bit of styrene or brass.

Still a long way to go.

[keystonecrossings]

I made my first pour of Envirotex Lite (water) into my Sherman's Creek module. Came out great. Made a second pour today. Here it is after the first pour...

[tom mann]

Chris, excellent work. 

[3rdrail]

Chris, excellent work. 

Better than excellent. He's got it blown up to G scale size and it still looks excellent. Looks like fine jewelry! 

[Chris333]

Actual SunDAY progress:

Before:


After:


Now off to work... :-\

[Zox]

I had a few setbacks, but today I finished cutting out the upper panels for my bridge:



Next step is clearing some of the cruft off the work area, so I have room for a next step.

I'll add a progress report to the "ICRR Bridge" thread later this evening...

[lashedup]

Some outstanding stuff!

Ok I dragged the photography module outside and put it on top of my car and snapped off a couple of quick pictures of where I'm at with this project:





I've done the initial coat of black paint (Steam Power Black with a little Grimey Black added) and made decals and added them. I also just finished adding the square headlamp surround and the larger angled number boards on either side of the headlamp but haven't taken pics yet. I'll post some once I've done them.

I've left most of the detail parts off so far because I need to install the sound decoder next. After that the detail parts will go on and weathering begins to give this sucker a nice patina. 

Anyhow, its been a fun project so far.

-jamie

[wm3798]

The H-16-44 got new pilots and a fresh paint job this week...


I'm now working on making the paint job not so fresh, then I'll seal it all with dullcoat and put the windows and lenses back in.

Just need to add cut levers and mu hoses.

Lee

[pnolan48]

I'm getting around the layout.

The plutonium research reactor marks the spot where deck 2 becomes deck 3. Most people think that reactors are huge facilities. Power generating plants are, indeed, huge. But many reactors are small--you wouldn't notice them if you walked by them. This is a medium-sized installation. There are no cooling towers, and any containment vessels are underground. Still, there are microwave towers, and guard towers, so this must be a military facility.

At the far left, bottom, is Boston, on the first deck, with skyscrapers holding up this deck. Up a bit on the far left is Westover.  That's where we turn around and go back. It's a gentle climb from here.

[wm3798]

Here it is!


Of course, it wasn't until I got to the office and uploaded the picture that I noticed the dern footboard fell off...   >

I'll fix it when I'm installing the mu hoses.

Lee