Buy anything cool lately?

Great buys everyone!

Those Menards vehicles look awesome! Apples55 you’re shopping right up the road from me, great store and people! I’m glad all of Bob’s little people got through customs with those tiny passports!

About two week ago I received a couple of Menards rolling stock. I got a Conrail boxcar, Conrail tanker, Conrail hopper, and the silver M&Ms boxcar.

The gentleman I ordered the Conrail from also included a Menards Morton Salt pickup for free since it was missing the plug. No complaints here!

I also recently picked up two more 022 switches. The lantern covers are missing the lenses, other then that they work great. I cleaned them up a little with some scotchbrite pads.

@coach joe posted:

You really need to stay away from that place.

Wow, Joe - that is really weird. You sound exactly like the voices in my head.

Luckily I forgot to mention the 2-pack of LIRR 21” passenger cars that I also picked up (they are for the Long Island C-Liner I also ordered that was postponed till later this year)

Is there a 12-step program for train enthusiasts???

@Yellowstone Special posted:

Apples55:  I too, like Lionel's 15" passenger cars from the early 2000s. Your UP 50th Anniversary set's passenger cars are similar to my 4-car set from 2001 and the supplemental 2-car set from 2002. These are also shown in the Passenger Car thread and in my 9/2/22 post in this thread. Only my diner does not have the station sounds and all of my cars do not have the full end vestibules. But I like the the 15-inchers'  performance on 036 curves, even through an S curve at the higher speeds with no problems or derailments. 😉

Vern;

I have O-72 and O-84 curves, so although I have (and like) the newer 21” cars, the 15” and 18” cars just look nicer to my eye, in spite of my love of big steamers!!! As for the station sounds, I couldn’t figure out how to operate it - apparently it is triggered by horn blasts of some key presses. That’s a problem for another day. As it stands, I am beginning to think that I’ve got too much sound on the layout

@Apples55 posted:

Vern;

I have O-72 and O-84 curves, so although I have (and like) the newer 21” cars, the 15” and 18” cars just look nicer to my eye, in spite of my love of big steamers!!! As for the station sounds, I couldn’t figure out how to operate it - apparently it is triggered by horn blasts of some key presses. That’s a problem for another day. As it stands, I am beginning to think that I’ve got too much sound on the layout

Impressive. Wish I had a layout like yours. To my mind's eye, 21" passenger cars in O scale are just huge. So I too, like the shorter lengths, as in the 15" ones. But I'm sure my 036 curves have a lot to do with that. I know what you mean about too much sound. Occasionally , I 'll just turn some of the sounds off for awhile.

I still think that Lionel's Union Pacific 50th Anniversary train is a beautiful set and you are lucky to have one. 😉

Picked up a few of the Lionel Cattle Corrals, made one working unit. Used some thin peel and stick felt furniture leg pads, cut them down to size for between the vibratory coil and corral. So far so good, still needs some cleaning up, will try some very thin sticky felt for underneath the cattle, scrub the ramps etc. 

Yes, I just received my special order of the B&O 2-8-0 Consolation Steamer, it came in today. The gloss finish is so refreshing, looking like it just came out of the paint shops, new and ready for duty. Wow, it actually works right out of the box. This was ordered several months ago from Patrick’s Trains, Wheeling W. Virginia. Thank you Patrick. Here’s some pictures for your review. Happy Railroading Everyone

"I’ve got too much..." Who'da thunk Paul would ever utter these words in any context?

Larry that consolidation is so shiny looks like Williams made it.

@Coach Joe, wow, your observation may be more truth than fiction as this new Locomotive is glossy. I will be reading the manual and then will post a short video. Your newly acquired Menards cars are beautiful, I will be visiting Menards in Owensboro Ky., or Evansville Indiana soon as they make a lot of neat buildings and Train cars. @RSJB18 Bob, you have a cool selection of people, Beep people, really cool. @Donnie Kennedy, congratulations on acquiring the really prestigious New York Central Hudson, it’s beautiful. Great buys everyone.

@coach joe posted:

"I’ve got too much..." Who'da thunk Paul would ever utter these words in any context?

It wasn’t me… it was the voices!!!

Wow, guess what?, from the other pictures I’ve posted, there’s something missing, Yes, it’s the beautiful Bell. A friend saw the pictures and gave me a call and he was correct. So, looking on the floor, near my train table that we unpack trains, was the bell. So, fellows unpack your new locomotives with care. Thank you William. Happy Railroading Everyone

Good for William.  The rest of us missed it.

@Apples55 posted:

It wasn’t me… it was the voices!!!

I keep hearing those voices too.....doing my darnedest to ignore them.....

@leapinlarry posted:

Wow, guess what?, from the other pictures I’ve posted, there’s something missing, Yes, it’s the beautiful Bell. A friend saw the pictures and gave me a call and he was correct. So, looking on the floor, near my train table that we unpack trains, was the bell. So, fellows unpack your new locomotives with care. Thank you William. Happy Railroading Everyone

That's a beauty Larry. Glad you found the bell before your foot did. The BEEP people will be put to work soon I hope.

Bob

Larry - just catching up on this thread. That locomotive is beautiful with or without the bell!!  Donnie Kennedy - great loco, love the Hudson.

Best Wishes

Don

Lionel bulkhead flat cars came today.

@leapinlarry posted:

Yes, I just received my special order of the B&O 2-8-0 Consolation Steamer, it came in today. The gloss finish is so refreshing, looking like it just came out of the paint shops, new and ready for duty. Wow, it actually works right out of the box.

The "Spirit of Williams Brass" lives on.  I agree it looks awesome!  Makes other engines look "dull".

Some stuff I scored at a recent Cabin Fever auction of MTH Warehouse items. Now, all but one of these pieces are run-of the mill starter-set cars, so nothing impressive about those. However, the cool part was in the speed at which CF got these out to me. Usually, the timeline goes like this:

Day 1: auction commences and concludes, after which the lots you've won are tallied up and you're e-mailed your invoice. Also Day 1: you recieve an email from their shipping partner allowing you to choose whether to pick up your items or have them shipped to you. Day 2: you'll get an email letting you know that your items are being readied for packing, and that the next message, sent via email and text message will allow you to pay for shipping/handling. Owing to the quantity of items in each auction (uaully around 600 lots), it can take awhile to get through them all. Day 5: Packing and shipping invoice. Assuming you pay the same day...Day 6: a tracking number is emailed and texted to you. Two days later (PA-NYC) I have the item in-hand.

In this case, the auction ended on Wedensday 8/31, and the items were on my doorstep Saturday 9/3. Impressive

Now, on to the meat of the delivery. I've always wondered how MTH assigned product numbers (if any) to the rolling stock included in their starter sets (since they occasionally get broken up). I don't have a definitive answer to that, but various Ebay sellers are using a scheme consisting of the set number plus a suffix indicating boxcar (B), tank car(T) and caboose (C), the typical RailKing set consist. I had to do a bit of hunting around to match up the cars with their respective sets and their numbers, so I'm posting these hoping it'll be useful to someone, whether here, or eventually when they show up in Google Images. Captions reference the image above :

30-4244-1B: C&O double-door boxcar from the Pennsylvania Steam Freight set (2017)

30-4245-1B: Northern Pacific double-door boxcar from the Southern Pacific Steam freight set (2017)

30-4247-1B: RailBox double-door boxcar from the BNSF Diesel Freight set (2018). This one took awhile to search, as there are no images of this car on Google Images or Ebay listings at the time I'm posting. I had to pore through images of RailKing sets till I found this car posed in the lineup in front of the set box.

30-4245-1C: Southern Pacific bay-window caboose from the Southern Pacific Steam freight set (2017)

30-4249-1C: Norfolk Southern bay-window caboose from the Norfolk Southern Diesel Freight Set (2019). This caboose and the previous one made me re-think the origins of the undecorated bay-window caboose I won in the 10/30/21 warehouse auction detailed in the post "A RailKing Caboose kit"). These two cabooses have nowhere near as many parts as the unassembled one, leading me to believe it is actually a Premier caboose.

20-98090: Northern Pacific drop-bottom gondola. A Premier piece that snuck into the lot of starter-set cars

Now we get to the real reason I bid on these lots...chrome-plated tank cars. There were three among the two lots I bid on. Also included in this group of photos is two more I got from Ebay, one I ran across (UP) while hunting for product number matches on Google Images, the other (ADM) I found on the seller's store after realizing he was dealing in set break-ups and may have others among his 4000-ish listings. The cars below only appear in starter sets to the best of my knowledge, and like the rest of the MTH cars in this post, were unboxed. I employed BCW-660 card boxes to store these 40'-ish cars without the excess room of the BCW-800s, and they even accomodate the smokestack on the cabooses, as well as the 10' width of the Premier gondola.

Also, I just noticed that the cars from steam headed sets have solid-bearing trucks, while the ones from diesel sets have roller-bearing trucks. Nice touch for a starter set

30-4244-1T: Gulf tanker from the Pennsylvania Steam Freight set (2017). Yes, it's missing a dome handrail. Might be able to find one on MTH parts someday. Lettering obscured in the reflection reads "GULF OIL COMPANY, PITTSBURGH, PA".

(Edit: 09/18/2022) While rummaging through my (still incomplete) collection records to figure out how many chrome tankers I already have I ran across a near-identical version of this car that appeared in the 2012 Rugged Rails catalog. The RR version has road number 10292 (this one is 10290) and is equipped with roller-bearing trucks.

30-4245-1T: Tidewater tanker, from the Southern Pacific Steam freight set (2017). "Tidewater" printed above the car number is obscured by the glare.

30-4248-1T: Archer Daniels Midland tanker. from the CSX Diesel Freight Set (2018). I ran across this one on Ebay after placing the NS car below on my watchlist, after realizing the seller was doing set break-ups and I looked through his selection of MTH tank cars.

30-4249-1T Norfolk Southern tank, from the Norfolk Southern Diesel Freight Set (2019).

30-4250-1T: Union Pacific tanker, part of the Union Pacific Diesel Freight Set (2019), and an Ebay purchase.

Now, what is the deal with all the chrome? Many years ago I decided to build a train comprised entirely of chrome-plated freight cars. Not sure what prompted this, it may have been a pair of prototypes being sold off by Williams at their York booth in 2007 that I picked up on a whim (they never went into production, and Williams had never been in the habit of keeping a production archive)

in any case, I had amassed a string of mostly tank cars done up like this, mostly from MTH, but also including four Lionel pieces (three of them MPC) as well as the aforementioned Williams samples. At first, I restricted my collecting to petroleum company roadnames, but as I came to the realization that was a pointless exercise being that any prototypicality went out the window with the chrome plating. I started snapping up all the shiny tankers I could find, a task that led me into a number of Cabin Fever auctions, Ebay, and finally one dealer in Greensburg, PA who had a whopping eight different examples of regular-production RK plated tankers, of which I placed an order for seven (leaving out the Coors Light for some reason). Those will be highlighted in another post since this one is long enough already.

As for the remaining chrome tankers I don't have? Among regular-issue cars, I'm aware of a Pennsylvania tanker (30-73221), a Killian's Irish Red (30-73239), Budweiser (30-73240), Harley Davidson (30-73220), Alaska (30-73222) and one Cargill car that is a starter-set exclusive, and has only one image on Google, part of a Kmart.com listing from this year that may well tie back to the same Ebay store where I got the UP and ADM cars, as the listing had the same wording as the dealer's own site). The Coors Light one? I'm wishy-washy on that, as it looks like it should go with the Silver Bullet set (which I have) even though it wouldn't look right hitched to it.

I don't yet have an accrurate count of how many cars this train will have when I get to run it, but it's likely at least 30 cars, and probaly more that that. I think I'll call it "Chromeapalooza" (because "King Chrome" is already taken, by both a rapper and a Canadian truck-parts store)

(Edit 09/16: ordered the Killian's, PRR and Alaska) (09/27: and now linked to the new photos)

(Edit 08/18/23) Discovered a triple-dome version of the Tidewater tanker. Investigating some leads

(Edit 09/10/23): Got the Tidewater, and two others

[Previous: Cabin Fever 8/10/22 auction wins + seven chrome tankers -> Two posts down] -- [Next: 10/3/22 Two Menards Doublestacks]

---PCJ

Received this a couple of days ago.  Ordered the appropriate decals from K4  Decals this morning.

Will have to bone up on using "today's" decals.  Have not declared since the 1950's.

A few years back MTH did sell these decorated for the road in question BUT got it wrong!

Have picked up a set of 6 plus four more hopper car from another set breaker up.   And again not prototypically decorated  MTH but do look good.  Will fit in to what I have in Mind.  Now have to figure how am I going to paint the loads to represent the materials in questions.

The related new engine should arrive soon!

Ron

An addendum to my previous post above--it took two hours to compile and when posted my browser hung on the 'Please wait..." screen for so long that it led me to think I'd lost the entire post when I didn't see it after refreshing Thank the like notification for pointing me to it the next day

In a more general train auction previous to this one (8/10) I gained a pair of K-Line aluminum tankers:

K6332-8016 Citgo tanker

K6332-8016 Same product number and UPC, but a different road number. I was outbid on a nearby lot that contained three of these tankers (with different road numbers) so I'll just have to be satisfied running them with the trio of BP tankers I got while K-Line was still in business.

Oh, and lastly, not all that glitters is gold. Sometimes it's a stack of chrome This order arrived during the week following the arrival of the cars in my previous post. The shop (Brady's Trains) does its shipping on Saturday owing to staffing, so having ordered on a Monday, I had that whole week plus the Labor Day weekend to be on pins and needles, but patience has its rewards

In this "display" from top to bottom:

1. 30-73260 Union Pacific
2. 30-73214 Iron City Beer
3. 30-73296 Gulf Oil
4. 30-73290 Pittsburgh Brewing Co. (Iron City) triple dome
5. 30-73268 Rolling Rock
6. 30-73238 Pittsburgh Brewing Co. (Iron City Light)
7. 30-73297 Keystone triple dome

In case you're curious, the labels in my previous post were made up to stick on the ends of the BCW boxes, with some additional info to add when I get around to adding these cars to my inventory. They're printed on a new version of the Post-it Note called "Super Sticky Full Stick Notes" that have adhesive across the entire note, save for a 3/8" strip at the bottom. This allows them to run through an (inkjet) printer stuck to a sheet of paper. Printer manufacturer probably would deem it a 'not recommended' tactic, but as long as the labels don't come loose as they loop around to the printhead, it shouldn't be any riskier than regular inkjet labels.

How did I get the text to line up? I stuck eight of these post-its to a sheet of paper and scanned it. Using an image editor I loaded up the scanned Post-its and then made a separate layer* of the image (so I could hide it later), then superimposed text atop the notes. Two sets of data will fit on each 2x2" note so I spaced each block of text so they could be cut apart into a pair of labels. Once done I hid the layer with the scanned notes so only the text would print, and ran the paper back through the printer with the Post-Its still attached.

For subsequent labels, I printed the initial scan so I could position a new set of Post-Its exactly where the previous ones were, and changed the text for the new data. Since each block of text added becomes an independent layer, I can hide those layers with the un-needed text so rather than having to print all 16 label slots I can print only what I need in a given session.

[Previous: Cabin fever 7/18/22 auction, Weaver SP+SSW+undec boxcars] -- [Next: Cabin Fever 8/31/22 MTH warehouse auction wins: Two Posts Up ]

---PCJ

* for the uninitiated, layers in an image editor like Photoshop, PhotoPea (a browser-based Photoshop clone), or Krita, work like a stack of animation cels, with a different part of the overall image occupying each transparent sheet. Everything on a layer can be altered independently of graphics appearing on any other layer.

Don’t get too tanked over these great finds!

I’ve been patiently waiting to get these geeps out of the boxes. I finally cleared the tracks today after I completed my clearance testing.
As the first picture attests I certainly don’t need more PRR geeps. But I felt it was a community service to keep these excellent condition engines from the scrapper. The restored 2028 is really well done and the 8357/58 are L/N but have been run. All in all it was a bargain.