Good morning from sunny and hot Northeast Ohio! Managed to complete some stuff this week! McKeen Models 50' flat with new A-Line Sill Steps, painted with Scalecoat II Boxcar Red and lettered with Mask Island decals. The advent of the the 45' trailers caused a problem with only hauling one trailer on the 89' TTX flats which was totally inefficent, so the Southern Railway had Ortner convert some old 50' boxcars into piggyback flats that could haul up to a 48' trailer. They were heavier than a standard piggyback flat but filled a need until they came up with the spine cars. Also painted and decaled the trailer, Brae trailer from Front Range painted with Scalecoat II Silver Paint and lettered with Microscale decals. Robbins Rail/A-Line/Con-Cor Greenville 60' Boxcar Kit, Shaved off the rivits to make the car look like Thrall car. Changed the wheelbase of the underframe from 41' to 46' to match the prototype and replaced the coupler pockets with Moloco Cushion Style coupler pockets. Also carved off the plug door fittings and glued a Plate C Superior Door I pirated off an Intermountain 5283CF Boxcar kit. Painted the car with Scalecoat Black, Boxcar Red and Silver paints and lettered with Mask Island decals. The Rock Island ordered a group of these cars, and about ten of them (including this car) were in service hauling Chevrolet Rear Axle assemblies from Detroit to the various final assembly plants. Another shot of my Rapido FA-2's on a different area of the Strongsville Club layout, lots of Ann Arbor and Green Bay and Western cars on this train. Thanks for looking! Rick Jesionowski
Another one from the Blue Water modular club layout this week. My Pere Marquette consolidation is shown here crossing the blue styrofoam desert on my lake front module. The locomotive is an IHC model. It still needs a PM style cab and to be renumbered into the 600 series it more closely resembles. I will probably settle for using water color to stain the lettering to venetian yellow (the correct color for PM locomotive lettering for the late 1930s) rather than stripping it to correct the font. At that point, I think it will be a fairly decent stand-in. The second photo shows the module under construction. Rippled plexiglass and black, dark blue and green spray paint along with a light buff color to re present sand. The results were surprisingly good enough so I will use it again on to model the Saginaw river on the new layout.
That's quite an interesting complex, exceptional work. Your model looks just like the real one. Thank you for posting. Joe