I'm very excited to announce that my personal McKeen Car is finally finished!
While I was waiting for the paint on the body to dry I put together the electronics on the Doodlebug chassis. For this build I added TMCC and sounds with an ERR Cruise Commander board and a Gas-Electric Railsounds board. This was my first installation of an ERR sound board in one of my projects. I was able to reuse the old Protosound 1 speaker since it's the same resistance and power rating as the ERR one. The installation was pretty simple with just one LED headlight and I got the chassis running satisfactorily by itself.
My homemade decals don't photograph well but you can just about see the text on the nose of my McKeen. The whole reason why I went with Cuyamaca is because their McKeens served an area called "Narragansett". I went to college near the "original" Narragansett in Rhode Island so the thought of another one amuses me!
Last night I sprayed the body with a thin coat of Rustoleum Matte Clear and it was dry enough to handle by the morning. 3D printed trains look a lot better with glass inside so I cut up a plastic food carton and filled in the windows. This time I used HVAC foil tape to hold the strips of plastic in place. It's very sticky and grabs well onto the ABS so the windows should stay in place. I'm going to use this for all of my future builds instead of rubber cement and packing tape.
I put the McKeen together with the matching mail trailer and started walking it through the paces. Through the track switches, up the gradient and into the downtown circle on my layout!
For those of you who are curious, the 70ft McKeen does have quite a bit of overhang on O31. The Doodlebug chassis handles the curves well but like most O Scale trains, it looks better on wider radii. I'm hoping that the 55ft McKeen that's under development will have a bit less overhang.
Here's the obligatory video for you. Volume warning ahead-- that horn is piercingly loud!
