G'day from St. Marys , Tasmania , Australia...We are a former railway town but no longer sadly. So I love modelling and am fascinated by American Rail ,especially BNSF... I'm building a 3.5 metres x 1.5 metres non proto typical mainly BNSF , CSX , tiny bit of UP and also run a couple of Norfolk Southern locos.. in HO.. Great fun particularly using since swithching to DCC... Run ES44s with sound , 8-40CW , with sound , soon a Dash 9 and several standard. So fascinating using You Tube to watch American operations at Flagstaff , Cajon Pass , Tehachapi , etc incredible.. I work at a our local High School (non teaching) own two border collies , play golf and am a sports nut. Keen to learn about Double stack modelling , switching and track warrants.. we do that here too.. Glad to be a part of Train Board and will be happy to regularly contribute.. Cheers..to all..
Welcome to TrainBoard! Jump in and get to know some folks here. Keep us posted on your modeling progress. Former railway town- Which means the tracks are now gone? Sad. Know what that is like. Every place I have ever lived in the US Pacific NW, tracks are gone. Except here and the local fools are trying to everything possible to chase this RR out of the city, so they have have a hiking trail about 15 blocks long!
welcome to the board...Tehatchapi is great fun, that being said, your not the only dog lover here. I have an English Mastiff and a St. Bernard. Also, tell Marcus Ambrose to drive a real race car! (Tasmania can't be THAT big)
G'day Boxcab E50,, Thanks for your response..Much appreciated. Yep. Our branchline disappeared in the late 1980s..My house is a former railway cottage dating back to 1886.. All stone foundations and all. The railway station is about 250 metres from my place and is soon to be re established as a rail museum . The building itself has been restored already. the nearest rail operations are 20kilometres (12.5 miles away) down the Valley...only coal trains though.. Tasmania is Australia's second oldest colony and State and the only island State , 42,000 sq kilometres (26000 sq miles) witha population of about 550,000 .but we can boast having Australia's first rail line in the very early 19th century.. Our rail system (one operator TASRAIL ) was run into the ground but last year the State Government committed 220 million dollars to upgrade locomotives , rolling stock , track and services again. About time.. Apparrently the design phase of the 17 brand new locomotives to be built in the USA is finished and the first of them will arrive mid 2013...will be great.. about a quarter million sleepers will have been replaced by then too...not sure status of rolling stock... I love the American System.. It's great but sorry to read that lines have shut too.. shame on them...trains are the most efficient and the best... Hope to add lots to future forums and activities.. Cheers....Rod..
G'day , Thanks Bremner..Great to hear from you... Wow a St Bernard and a Mastiff.... Incredible dogs and BIG..My border collies are nine y.o and two y.o and are nutcases...trying to round up anything that moves...What do you mean , he drives a Ford doesn't he ? He won two v8 Supercar titles , our NASCAR equivalent before heading to your shores a few years back.. I'm a Ford nut and have a dear old 4 litre 2001 AU Falcon...still drives great.. I'm building a non prototype BNSF layout with the odd UP,CSX and NS as well. It's DCC since mid last year but wiring turnouts and crossovers is a bit harder than I thought and so is getting some Double stack wellcars here in OZ...near impossible..Our dollar is on parity with yours now so I might buy in USA soon. Thanks for your comments... Cheers Rod..(tigers1960)
Rod, please do not compare that V8's with NAPCAR...yes, your dollar is on par with ours, so now is a great time to buy....
Welcome Rod, (I'll use that term instead of G'day, there's so many of us Aussies on here now we'll have to open an embassy). Just been googling this "Napcar", seems it's a derogatory term and poor old NASCAR is losing it's fan base, something that our V8 Supercars seems to be trying to avoid by opening it up to more vehicle brands and modern engines. They need to get away from this idea of everyone using the same engine and chassis and relying on the body shell as the only way to tell them apart, get some real brand competitivenss going. I'll PM you a couple of US websites that offer good prices and deals so as not to step on any toes.
I'll add my welcome to Trainboard too, Rod. When you are ready to shop in the US ... don't forget to take a look at our advertisers.
G'day Bremner,, sorry about that... we don't have anything directly like Nascar of course but I don't think you have the Supercar series comparison in the US, although there is to be a round of our V8 Supercars in Texas next year..they used to run overseas rounds in Bahrain and New Zealand (NZ still of course) but the US market is huge and it's great racing.. Toyota are developing a V8 to join Ford and GMH (General Motors) next season too.. Two things the US and Australia have in common,, BIG TRAINS and BIG FAST V8s.. Can you give me a heads up on Double Stack wellcars...Can't buy them here..I'd love to ggrab some and run behind my ES44AC's . Favourite locos of alltime are the dear old SD40-2s though..Have several of them .. Great sounds from the EMD deisels Where is Casa Grande...? Great perion to model too . Mid 1980s...What locos.... SD 40s , 45s 60s maybe some 8-40CWs .. fantastic era.. Never get sick of watching You Tube Cajon Pass , Summit , etc from then , a couple of beauties especially and more recently a Monster Train meeing in Flagstaff Arizona. Thanks again Cheers tigers1960 (Rod).
G'day Ironhorseman (Bill) THANKS FOR THE WELCOME...I love TRAIN BOARD... It's awesome , which I only found by accident...I certainly do watch the amazing range of modelling items in the US.. Our dollar and yours are parity now but the killer is postage... unfortunately.. I used to buy in the US when I first started building my layout in 2009 and got some top stuff but unless you spent a lot of money for a big consignment..the postage used to be $70 plus .. Mostly I buy from two outlets in Queensland and Victoria here in OZ.. A bit dearer but average postage is about $12 EXPRESS POst so I get next day.. The dealer in Qld. now has Intermountain merchandise. I bought two BNSF ES44Ac locos with TSunami4 Sound for $256 each and they're great. Better than the Atlas Gold series with Quantum sound.. About to pick up a Dash 9 too...a bit cheaper $249... By the way , what does Get Goosed on the Yreka Western refer to... Love to talk more sometime... Cheers Rod...Mid winter here and Minus 2 on this Saturday morning...
Keeping it simple, I'll just add a welcome aboard. Always good to get more input from other parts of the world...although I have to tell tootnkumin that we don't do diplomatic immunity here :funny:
Rod, CG is about 65km south of Phoenix, and it is a just a typical town. I was looking for something to be able to model with a main line and switching at the same time. Tehatchapi and Cajon are just main lines. I thought about downtown LA, but most was abandoned in the 1960's-70's, so thatwould rule out tunnel motors. All in all, it is just acity that I live in and no one models, yet it is on my favorite prototype. I paln to build the main with some industries. I plan to have a staging yard on the back so I can run trains of SD40-T2's, SD45's, a lone U30C. Locals will be pulled by a GP35E and a U25B. I have the U boats, but they were retired before my era, but it is MY railroad....any ways, there were B-23-7's, B-30-7's and B-36-7's as well, so i plan to get one
G'day Tootnkumin...Thanks from a fellow Aussie....love your handle..very inventive... mine refers to my footy team sad as it is Richmond Tigers and the year I was born...very boring... so , a banana bender....great place to be.. I bet you loved beating the blues in the State of Origin the other night. I wish the AFL had the same... There's a great bloke I correspond with who lives in Bathurst NSW but is a Queenslander through and through who used to be a train driver. He's driven in every State of OZ of course including Tassie and his videos are incredible over a lot of years.....we have another link for a bit longer.. Tassie in the 1970s replaced the old X and Y series locos with QR refurbished CO-CO locos reclassified as Z series...built in Queensland too.. They ,themselves are just about to be replaced with US designed and built locomotives from next year....Give me a hoy if you'd like info on Steve's videos etc... Cheers to you... tigers1960 (Rod)..
G'day again, Thanks for great reply..Wow... Would love to see some great train action in and around Phoenix, and Arizona in general...there'd be a lot of amazing BNSF stuff going on...Have you done Cajon Pass , Sullivans Curve much too in ol' California. So envious.. all we have in our area is TASRAIL coal trains....no mixed freight... Is your layout analog or DCC. ? I've switched to DCC since last year...It's 9.20 am on a very cold frosty winter morning here and I'm driving 25 kms to a friend's place to lay ballast on his new layout would you believe shortly... he's doing a Canadian National layout. done all his wiring. track and basic scenery... Thanks again Cheers from OZ... tigers1960 (Rod)..PS.. You have a U Boat as they say,,,just one is one more than I have...they're awesome...
G'day Eagle 2, Thanks for the welcome... Train Board is incredible... Diplomatic Immunity I'll remember that...I'm a massive US Rail fan and wish we had similar here in Oz... One day possibly..... I'm a huge BNSF fan and my layout I hope will reflect that over time.. but any of the big companies are great to learn about.. My dad was a railway ganger (track foreman) on our local section of 23 miles until he retired in 1985...He didn't have hi rail vehicles most of the time until about 1980,,,until then the track gang used motorized trolleys to do the line....Hope to regularly contribute to the forums,, Thanks again for welcome Cheers tigers1960 (Rod)..
Hi Rod, and Welcome also. Possibly your question about the Galloping Goose can be best answered by those who attended the most recent Goose Fest....http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/showthread.php?143509-2012-Goose-Fest.
G'day Bremner,, Checked out your friend's stuff..Postage a killer though..Still might investigate more however.. Watched Unstoppable on Foxtel on sunday night... Great movie action wise , especially with an SD40-2 as a star of the movie but just a teensy,weensy far fetched... An SD40 with 5000 hp.. coupling up at 60-70 mph ... Good looking yardmasters etc.. Mind you I rewatched it off the hard drive...How rare are 'coasters' in real life. Funny though the plot re . hazardous chemicals ,,potentially could have happened for real in Ohio last few hours..It's on the news channels here with ethanol... Cheers tigers1960.. (Rod)..
