The Texas Chief left its home rails at Tower 17 in Rosenberg and entered Houston via track rights on the Southern Pacific Sunset Route. Here it is crossing the Brazos River in Richmond.
Did a couple of covered hoppers this week! Bowser 1958 CF ACF Covered Hopper Kit, painted with Scalecoat II Boxcar Red and lettered with Herald King Decals. Car was originally built in 1950 and this is a 1977 Repaint, used for hauling sand from Michigan to the Ford Casting Plant in Brook Park, Ohio. Tangent Dry-Flow unlettered car, found some Oddballs decals in Rock Island for it. No pictures to be found, used the decal diagram. Car originally built in 1962. It is very hard to find pictures of any of the Dry-Flow cars, seems people were more interested in taking pictures of engines and leaving the car histories behind. Thanks for looking! Rick Jesionowski
Last "smoke and mirrors" photo, also in Davidsville where the street appears to curve to the left at the rear. From the edge of the tan building to the wall it's about 1": John
Here are some GP-9's. I am getting ready to back date the lettering. I have an air eraser on order. (Hopefully deliver will be tomorrow) Thanks, Wolf
This week I'm getting plans organized for my Modular Z Scale layout using 3D Printed Code 40 Flex Track. Appreciate any feedback/suggestions in the Design Thread Here is a test strip of the 3D Printed C40 Flex painted and ballasted.
Candy, I would drive by quickly, but carefully without making eye contact, and hope I could outrun the tricked out Hog and its brethren.
Looks like those girls got them wrapped around their little fingers...Maybe one has a tire iron under her petticoat?
This is an older photo. But I have to admit, I was running the John Deere units with the Turtle Creek Central train last night, and an A-B-B-A set on the point of six cars looks pretty good! From Left to Right: Stewart F3, Athearn R-T-R 5571, Stewart F9 5771 and Athearn John Deere F7 1936.
Like always, I have a soft spot for stuff that's close to home. Really like the D&TSL hopper. Nice sand spill effect.
After posting this on jasonboshe's layout construction thread, I'll try to get it right here instead. This past week, a guy brought in 6 or 7 Rubbermaid boxes full of trains. While all my friends fought over the Walthers hoppers, I got all the cool kits. I paid $20 for them, so if was definitely worth it. The first one to be built was this C&BT Shops kit. It is a modernized 1944 AAR boxcar. My inspiration was the roofwalk. Instead of fitting into holes in the roof like other kits, it just glued on top. I could easily just not glue it on. The ladders have three pins on each side, but the car does not have hole for the top one. All of that got the gears turning. I went to the internet and found some cars without roofwalks. The B end had a high brakewheel and stock full height ladders, and since there was no roofwalk, a corner grab was directly on the roof. The other had cut down "modern" ladders. the kit was a little sketchy. The kit grab irons weren't the same size as the holes they went in, so I replaced them with metals ones. The absence of some of the ladder mounting holes made cutting them down easy. The trucks have plastic wheels with metal treads that have to be put together. For an afternoon of work, it turned out pretty good. I still need to paint the grab irons, however.
Gonna hiy you with a video again, in fact two. Got a wild hair over the weekend and decided to see how many cars I could haul up the two and a half percent grade on my layout. It is a train too long for my layout. Did put a helper mid train.A normal train for me is usually 8 to 10 cars as the layout was built mainly for switching. After this video was taken I emptied out all of the industries of any freight cars and added 20 some cars to the train, and had to add another helper behind the caboose. Unfortunately, the battery on the camcorder died half way on this longers train. Here's a shorter version. Here's a ground level roll by. This layout is DC, but these locomotives are the first Atlas Alcos that came out with the Kato drive. They all run at almost the exact same speed so adding helpers anywhere in the train is no problem.
But Why? You have demonstrated over the past years that you are more than capable of holding your own against ALL comers, especially male modelers.