More Inyo & Furnace Creek RR next generation...

[kurmujjin]

Been an long time since I was in here posting.  Spent two months away from home, visiting my daughter and her family as they got used to having a second child.  So we have a new granddaughter!  And I have way too many 12" = 1' projects that get in the way of railroading.  BUT I made some progress on the decision as to what to do next.  I pretty much have ruled out On30, as I really want a loop for continuous running and I don't want to overpower the room with layout.  So it will be pretty much 15-18 inches deep  with 10" radius loops on either end.  The far side will be higher than the front and it will cross over twice, once at either end with the high line away from the operator, toward the wall.

So THAT means either n-scale, or HOn30 with short-ish cars. 

I thought, what the heck, maybe I can do n-scale in the desert, keeping the theme of SP in the 50s.  But I had a hard time finding an engine.  I wanted to use a gift cert from my kids, so that meant a new one.  The nicest engine I could find for the money was a NYC Bachmann consolidation.  Not very desert-y...  So maybe I do eastern railroading, or maybe I keep the desert theme and convert the tender to oil.

Then the little darling showed up in the mail.  WOW, is that tiny!  And it had an issue or two.  Seems the headlight bracket and lamp point up about 5 degrees and it doesn't look that easy to fix.  I have a call in to Bachmann, but their staff is out of office and they won't address it until they open back up and their techs are on site.

That's when the little beast on my left shoulder started whispering "Keep the mechanism, convert to HOn30".  I'm nuts, I must be.

[dem34]

Eh, I had much worse from a K4 I bartered out of National Capital's Greeneberg booth.
 You should be able to carefully bend it back with fine tweezers (or you're fingers)  I have an identical Connie in my Show running stock with an identical issue. And I was able to carefully bend the lamp down with some some teasing.
Some iffy phone pictures but yeah, the Bachmann cases aren't the best in preserving the front end details in Transit as you can also tell by the couplers.

[kurmujjin]

More decisions...  I've decided that I really need to keep this simple and somewhat inexpensive.  The 16 in. shelf width is a given.  A continuous loop is a given. I can surrender a loop (26" square shelf) on each end.  But that loop will be 12" radius or so.  n-scale is just too small for my taste, so HO it will be.  But not HOn30 (too much kitbashing) and not HOn3 (too expensive).  What that leaves me with is HO standard gauge, VERY short cars (25' to 40'), very small engines.  What I want is the feel of Southern Pacific NG, but in standard gauge.  So we'll see what happens.  That means, though, there will be some On30 stuff and some n-scale stuff for sale or maybe it will end up in a shelf display.  And some stuff may end up in the dumpster because I started, but didn't finish some kitbashes.  oops.

The NYC consolidation goes back to ModelTrainStuff.