I found this one in a thread on the old Atlas forum - Also, there's a B&W picture of 452 in the same scheme on page 60 of Louis Marre's "Rock Island Diesel Locomotives 1930-1980". Funny thing about these locos - they ran them "long hood front" just like when they were RS-2's. That must've looked pretty weird. -Mark
Aye, I'm glad to have them as well. And had I been thinking, I would have stocked up on firecracker antennas at the same time. As is, I built my own by stripping a short piece of insulation off the thinnest wire I could find and then mounting it on a piece of cat whisker (handy stuff!) -Mark
I'll grab my copy in a few minutes for a look. So they simply just kept the RS2 cab layout as before, with no changes. Now I wonder if they'd have chopped the short hood, had the cab interior been altered....
Sorry, Ghengis... Just haven't time lately to get the numberboards redone. I'll try to get some shots this weekend without the boards. Just not enough hours in the day!hboy: Thanks for the reminder...
I know these are not Rock Island models, but Ghengis requested that I post these pics. I wish I could say "I did these" But the truth is I contracted a guy in Washington state; The Blue Caboose. I wanted a couple of MKT Duces! I did a couple of GP's years ago and I just wasn't cherishing the idea of doing the stripes again. You've probably seen some of his stuff on eBay, he goes by the name of merel404 I think. He does stuff that he calls "Done for fun, meant to be run" He also did some BN units for another one of our clubs member at the same time. Overall he did a fantastic job on these given the fact that the decals that I had were old enough that some of the lettering and stripes fell apart when he dropped them in the water! hboy: I need to go back and retouch the number boards because for what ever reason, he didn't put the inserts in place and decaled over the hollow spaces. It's not a big deal and will be simple enough to fix when I get the time to work on them. He offered to go back and fix them, but I didn't want to take a chance of re-shipping them again and having something happen to them. If you look closely at the front number boards, you can kind of see how they are caved in. This only happened on the front boards, two were completely gone. I told him not to fret if the decals didn't come out perfect due to the age as I'm planning to weather them a bit, but not rustbuckets. His reaction was that of HORROR. "You're not going to spoil my work with weathering are you"? LOL! I told him that if I didn't, they would stand out like sore thumbs! I also want to go back and add some details to them like cab shades, MU hoses and a rear facing horn. These are going to look great pulling my FPPX coal drag! I've also got one of the new Atlas MKT GP38's on order.
I was very happy when he sent me the photos for inspection before he shipped them! That would be the one BC. The job he did getting all the stripes lined up is almost perfect. Where they don't is due to the actual decal being out of line, not his workmanship. He prides himself on being a perfectionist, and it shows. He told me that he really liked MKT, that is until he had mine finished.....LOL
I first saw some of his work, roughly twenty years ago. He was heavily into painting Montana Rail link units. Almost persuasive enough for me to take up modeling that RR.
I see Bachmann has announced Rock Island #1227 as part of their next run of GP7's. No pictures yet, though. -Mark
As promised back in December... Something borrowed, something new, something old and something new... Fans of Louis A. Marre's book, Rock Island Color Pictorial-Volume 3 should recognize this Geep. I went full detail on this, even the fans which I really like the looks of. Any luck and I'll get the rest of the painting done as well as starting on the decals.
Jim- Don't believe I have ever seen anyone model that unit. Is this for your own fleet? Or for someone else?