Weekend Update 11/27/11

[sirenwerks]

You laugh, but I bought the Billy Mays Gopher right after my back surgery and it's great!  I've even been able to put my shoes on with it.

That's one smart gopher. 'Think I could get a badger to do that too?

[Puddington]

I've been using one of the hospital grabbers for over ten years to rescue cars from a badly designed tunnel....it also picks up a beer car with amazing accuracy.....

[Dave Schneider]

Limited progress on the outfit cars this week.


Car #3 - While building the new sides, I began to ponder exactly how to cut out the Intermountain sides and get the floor and ends filed or sanded down to the exact interior width.  It occurred to me that an easier approach might be to build a replacement floor and inside ends in styrene, which is what I have done for car #4 . . . . . so I did:



Tim

Tim,

Very nice work on these cars (as usual). I can't recall whether you posted any proto photos of these outfit cars.  It would be nice to see some pics of what you are building.

Your models are always so cool that they don't get the accolades at times that they deserve. I always enjoy your work and your presentation of the process.

Best wishes, Dave

[rogergperkins]

MTL undecorated RPO in B&O Royal Blue.
Inserting the brake wheels and the truck pins were two of the more challenging steps.
The brake wheels appear very delicate as well as being small for my fat fingers.

[Philip H]

Finally got back into the train room after a too long hiatus:

Finish this Intermountain KCS Autoparts boxcar.  Bought it as a kit so long ago I don't actually remember when.  It's still on the IM pizza cutters for now, but BLMA friction bearing trucks are in its future.  It's totally now era appropriate for me, but with a good dose of weathering it may well make interchange service on a late 60's/early 70's themed layout I know out east . . .



Also added this hopper to the fleet - Ian's run of B&M MOW cars came out really nice.  I actually wasn't sure I'd weather it, but once I put the india ink wash on the rock load, doing the rest of the car was amazingly easy . . .



Finally I got into some scenery - with an unplanned mini-scene.  While at Timonium last, I got to talking to the proprietor of Paws of a Bear, who has a great N Scale 70's ranch house in a laser kit.  As I was leaving he handed me a small card with some N Scale grave stones layered onto it, along with some backing (task board) to make them thicker.  So, a little india ink later, they became an abandoned family graveyard, barely poking out of the weeds behind the Exxon Plant.

[wm3798]

You need a rusty iron fence around that, and a couple of rebel flags...

[skytop35]

I bought a couple of Walthers 64 seat coaches and started to bash them into a Rock Island coach for general Rocket service. These cars had vestibules at both ends and were numbered 323-338. They also carried names on the car side from cities along the Rock Island lines, such as #328 "Topeka".  I cut the vestibule off one of the cars and spliced it onto the other. Looks good already but I need to change some of the windows near the car ends to match the prototype car. Hopefully I'll show that progress next week.

[Philip H]

You need a rusty iron fence around that, and a couple of rebel flags...

Working on the fence . . . and that part of north Baton Rouge is heavily African American, so rebel flags don"t last long.

[Scottl]

Fired up the paint and decal department.  Microsol is the nectar of the gods :





I like the CN North America scheme a lot, and I've wanted one of these 4-window C44-9W units for as long as I have been modelling in n scale.

[dwyaneward]

A good week and weekend of work on the layout, got trains running on the complete layout.

Solve a staging control problems with a circuit from our David K Smith http://whiteriverandnorthern.net/clinic_38.htm
Thanks David!

Finished mainline feeders, installed two auto reverser, two control panel frames and clean the room up.

[BCR 570]

Tim,

Very nice work on these cars (as usual). I can't recall whether you posted any proto photos of these outfit cars.  It would be nice to see some pics of what you are building.

Your models are always so cool that they don't get the accolades at times that they deserve. I always enjoy your work and your presentation of the process.

Best wishes, Dave

Dave:

Thank you, and no I haven't yet - thought I would do that when the cars are built.  For a couple of photos I will have to obtain the permission of the photographer to post them online.


Tim

[John]

Slow week for me .. suffering from a dental crown put in on Wednesday - its loose and painful .. and dentist was closed for the holiday


Did some electrical work over at a friends layout ..

[sizemore]

Slow week for me .. suffering from a dental crown put in on Wednesday - its loose and painful .. and dentist was closed for the holiday

I get mine on the seventh. At 8am, no less.


The S.

[pwnj]

I'm a new guy so I can't post pics here yet, but here's a link to my latest photo:

Fixed the link/embed issue, so here's the photo:



This is my son's new (well, new-to-him anyway) N-scale Bachmann Spectrum 2-8-0 on my little diorama.  Shot is taken from my deck (right out the back window, on top of a stool and a stack of boxes) in the early evening.  All special effects were added with Gimp (open-source, free image editing software).  Models on the diorama are cardstock (left one is the freebie from Evan Designs, the right one is one I designed, then added match sticks and scale lumber to finish it off).  Ground, roads and ballast are all PlayDoh.  Ground cover is ground parsley (fine and medium to simulate scruffy growth and leaves).  Trees are home-made ground foam on different armatures (one is Cat-5 wire painted brown, a few are real tree-like twigs, a few are snips from an artificial Christmas wreath, trimmed with the bottom part wrapped with brown florist's tape.  I don't currently have a layout, but will hopefully be building a switching layout based loosely on the Bush Terminal Railroad in Brooklyn, NY.  Hope you like it.

[seusscaboose]

puttered around doing scenery, trackwork, benchwork, visited a T-Trak event in Bowie, Md and had an DCC/Electrical epiphany in the basement (sometimes the fastest way to take 1 step forward is to take 2 steps back) thanks to some brainstorming and elbow grease.