Mostly I've been working on putting a roof on the bridge I'm building. I found corrugated tin actually made out what looks like tin. Think Reynolds Wrap only thicker and sturdier. It's not the best stuff I've ever seen, not to mention it's the only stuff I've ever seen that doesn't say polystyrene, but it's the closest thing to actual tin I've ever seen.
Cutting it with an xacto knife is not easy, in fact it's excruciating, so I use scissors and reform the bent valley with a toothpick. Gluing it down requires me to stand and hold it in place for a 100 count in some cases, but for the most part it submits quickly and doesn't fight me too much. I use spring loaded potato chip bag clips on the end where it meets the eve of the roof to set that part while I hold down the part along the ridge. Slow going but it's fun.
Finally found an MTH Milky Way Cylindrical Hopper in California. Guy wanted way too much for it, but I gave him an offer and he upped it a bit, but far better than the price he originally wanted. Nice guy. Said he liked my honesty. I told him in my offer it was only priced at $50 bucks on the MTH website and it was used to boot. So I threw him a bone and he countered and now I have an expensive but way less than it could have been hopper.
Just curious. Does anyone know what scale protocol Lionel and MTH use to build their rolling stock? I searched the web and based on what I read, they both use the 1/4 inch scale as a guide, but Lionel "Standard O" and MTH "Premier" are the categories that actually stick to the 1/48 scale pattern. The rest follow sort of a pseudo quarter inch scale pattern that causes them to be smaller than actual quarter inch scale. Railking is an example. They stick to the details and build a close to scale size model, but if you actually measure the product, it wouldn't quite measure to the actual length of a real box car.
The reason I ask, I have two flat bed intermodal trailer cars hooked together on one of my trains. One is the MTH Dr. Pepper trailer, the other is a Lionel Nesquik trailer. You can look at the two cars and tell that MTH dwarfs Lionel. The trailer is obviously larger in every way it can be. Yet both companies use the quarter inch scale as their guide. I'm just interested in knowing a bit more on how they massage the sizing. Anyone not familiar with model trains comes to my house and sees my trains, first thing they see is that some box cars are this big, and others are bigger yet they are both O gauge sized.
