I can't even paint my heavy tool car, today is going to be the twentieth day in a row at 110f or hotter...
My plan is a Southern Pacific maintenance of way train. I have an Intermountain SD40-T2, a Bachmann crane and tender, a Micro Trains horse car...and a random box car....
58 and raining here. The annual street rod rally and parade was a complete flop. Often takes twenty minutes in a double line up main street. Today was a single line of less than thirty cars and just a few minutes. Everyone attending was quite stunned and left, shaking heads, muttering, etc.
I've been distracted, rewiring the JACALAR and yard area to be ballasted. Might get to the weathering project in a couple weeks.
Over the past week, my youngest son and I have shifted into gear working on weathering our train. We have been planning it for the last few weeks and since the deadline is approaching, we've been spending at least an hour most nights.
So my son Cort and I are very close to finishing our train. We chose Rio Grande...here's the train make up: 1) Atlas (Kato) GP30 - D&GRW #3027. Added Sunrise snow plow and MU hoses and Micro-Trains couplers. 2) Red Caboose 2 bay hopper D&RGW #15999 - Weathered for cement transportation. Micro-Trains couplers. 3) Micro-Trains 50' gondola D&RGW 56454 - Loaded with new railroad ties. Gondola has been scuffed, dinged, stressed and weathered due to heavy maintenance of way usage. 4) Athearn 53' GSC flat car D&RGW 22755. Converted to Micro-Trains couplers. Added a real wood deck (piece by piece) and then lightly weathered. Load is a new Catepillar excavator bucket to be delieved to a MOW crew up in the mountains. 5) Atlas 50' box car - DRGW 61415. Weathered with chalks. Sunrise FRED added to the rear along with Richmond Controls flasher mechanism that uses track power via metal pickup strips that run to each metal axle. Car is in our MOW fleet to carry tools and supplies.
Cort was the main driver of this project. He was really on my the last two days with "Can we weather now?"
Curious, not nit-picky... would the excavator bucket be fastened down with chain or blocking or something? Or is it heavy enough to just be set down and it wouldn't move when travelling?
I'm planning on some cribbing and I'd like to add chains but I'm not sure what I have here. I told my kids that we'd just take one of my wife's fine necklace chains for the tiedowns
What did you use to create the ties? I am in need of an idea on how to represent freshly cut ties heading to the creosote plant for treatment but have no idea what sort of size and resource would be appropriate. TIA
The ties were actually purchased for hand laid turnouts. I think the brand was "gloor craft"? I bought it as a lot of track making materials. They came as you see here and were the exact right size (slightly tight in the gon). I can get some measurements to see the actual sizes.
Ryan - perhaps try cross stitch floss for the tie down. I've used it in past to simulate the chains on military vehicle loads. A couple of lengths twisted together, bonded with diluted white glue and painted an appropriate color. And Richmond makes some great products!
Good suggestion Eagle2, thank you. I'll give that a try. I'm out of time for the contest but I will continue adding some details to this train. I need to install a TCS CN-GP decoder to get it out on the rails since Cort wants to run it. Funny how investing a couple weeks into a project does that I took some photos with outdoor lighting so here are my final shots before midnight.
Even though it's exciting for us to win the prize, I was hoping to see others' work. These contests have been a great catalyst to get my sons and me working on weathering! Cort is super excited!
I got myself distracted with my JACALAR yard project, and totally spaced on this. But, you guys really blew past anything I would have been able to do. Great job
Just an update...Cort opened up the prize and has been running it around his room! Next step is to figure out how to install a hard wire decoder in this Model Power FP7 (it's the metal shell version). A fellow N scaler had one of these running DCC on the layout this weekend so I know it's possible.
