Buy anything cool lately?

Gotta love that New York office.  I wish I had one like that.  Office I mean.

@M. Mitchell Marmel posted:

The NYC office sent me an MPC era Pennsy streamliner set last year, but I didn't have appropos motive power for the same until I sold a bunch of stuff at the train show and picked up a K-Line tuscan GG-1:

Also picked up a prewar crane car and complementary gondola...

Mitch

I gotta find out where that NY office is.......

Please promise that this one will not get painted red.......

Bob

@RSJB18 posted:

I gotta find out where that NY office is.......

Please promise that this one will not get painted red.......

No, it wouldn't match the consist if I did THAT...

Mitch

@RSJB18 posted:

I gotta find out where that NY office is.......

Please promise that this one will not get painted red.......

Bob

Just to cover all the bases… or blue… or pink… or Warbonnet…

@Apples55 posted:

Just to cover all the bases… or blue… or pink… or Warbonnet…

Scooped up a pair of Atlas DASH-8's in our very local For-Sale forum.  Although I'm sometimes skeptical of Atlas stuff due to the older electronics, these came with ERR electronics, and they are a good looking pair.

@Apples55 posted:

Just to cover all the bases… or blue… or pink… or Warbonnet…

Stop giving him ideas.

Have finally acquired a very nice AB pair of the colorful 2245 Texas Special last weekend at the Asheville Train Show.

Always admired these when I was a boy but had American Flyer at the time.  These have two small paint rubs on the B unit but overall are quite nice.

Mitch - cannot go wrong with a GG1.

@Guttersnipe  I recently bought an airbrush to detail trees.  I do not have the skills to do a paint job on a piece of rolling stock - might never have. The real issue is I do not have a piece to do a repaint.

That said I have a Quality Craft N6B caboose kit that will need a paint job. Looks like Pennsy and UP ran them. Otherwise I may look at building it into something Illinois Central ran. Do not see evidence IC ever ran any, even through all the mergers over time. 

Next time you go to a swap meet pick up one of those $1.550 Ho scale Box cars. or on the safe side 4 or5 of them.   Use them to enhance your skills,  I believe you will have a great time.  the only draw back to an air-brush is the clean up.  Meanwhile try to paint your favor scheme on the box cars.  for Taping I use Green frog, is really doesn't leak.  Further more your air brush puts on a thinner coat, and the details stand out more.    Onceyou start you probably won't want to stop

You can do it Jeff; I bought a simple airbrush to do the pilots on some of my engines that I made fixed pilots! It worked so well, and you can't even tell the difference!

I lie Guttersnipe's idea I might even give that a try down the road!

@mike g.  Mike did you ever post anything on converting to fixed pilots?   I've looked at closed pilots on the MTH parts site for F3s. Hard to tell which might work. I have an SF F3 I would like to take the front coupler out of and replace with a closed/covered pilot. A later Milwaukee Road K-Line F3 has the closed pilot which looks great to me.  I suppose I could glue a piece of plastic in the hole, finish it and call it a day.

@Guttersnipe  You are making more projects for me. I don't seem to have enough time in retirement as is to get things done. Wondering how I got thing done when I was working???

@ScoutingDad posted:

@mike g.  Mike did you ever post anything on converting to fixed pilots?   I've looked at closed pilots on the MTH parts site for F3s. Hard to tell which might work. I have an SF F3 I would like to take the front coupler out of and replace with a closed/covered pilot. A later Milwaukee Road K-Line F3 has the closed pilot which looks great to me.  I suppose I could glue a piece of plastic in the hole, finish it and call it a day.

@Guttersnipe  You are making more projects for me. I don't seem to have enough time in retirement as is to get things done. Wondering how I got thing done when I was working???

Jeff I didn't as I was able to buy the new pilots of line and just paint them. It was for my ES44AC's which was very easy!

Hi Jeff, here is a few things I found searching for F3 and F7 stuff.

Fixed pilots for F3 and F7 locomotives | O Gauge Railroading On Line Forum (ogaugerr.com)

and from P&D Hobby on The big Bay.

NOTE:  Ebay link removed per OGR Terms of Service

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

Scooped up a pair of Atlas DASH-8's in our very local For-Sale forum.  Although I'm sometimes skeptical of Atlas stuff due to the older electronics, these came with ERR electronics, and they are a good looking pair.

Hi John, those are really great looking models, leave it to Atlas! I would love to have a pair of those too, but they probably require 072 curves.

Question, have you run them yet? I'd like to know how they run and sound with the ERR. Also, are you planning to lash them up? Video?

Thanks for sharing them, nice find and purchase!

@WesternPacific2217 posted:

Hi John, those are really great looking models, leave it to Atlas! I would love to have a pair of those too, but they probably require 072 curves.

Question, have you run them yet? I'd like to know how they run and sound with the ERR. Also, are you planning to lash them up? Video?

Thanks for sharing them, nice find and purchase!

Well, I ran them on O72, but I'm sure they don't require that, the box says O31.  The run and sound great, and they did MU seamlessly.  These are the lower tier, no cab figures, but I can fix that.  They are really good looking engines in any case, Atlas does do top notch detailing.

This past week I took delivery of two locomotives.

One of them decidedly lightweight, the other...not so much.

One quite detailed, the other, not so much.

Enough with the vagueness, on to the hardware. Descriptive text references the photo above.

Back two posts when I talked about a group of Lima European freight cars I acquired off Ebay, somewhere under the part where I rambled on about the G-scale Marklin car I received in error, I mentioned maybe looking for one of Lima's diesel locomotives, perhaps a British Rail Class 33 or the French SNCF BB-67400 diesel they modeled. Well, one of each turned up a couple of weeks ago from the same seller, not as a buy-it-now entry but a regular auction. Somebody took an interest in the BB-67400, but the BR Class 33 sat unloved for the entire auction at its starting price of just under $25 with no bids (though a number of people were watching it), till I put in a bid and won it at the starting price. Shipping from MN was about the same as the selling price, but at a total price of 49.50, it cost less than the shipping alone had I got it from a UK seller

Nice shade of blue there, but I believe the actual British Railways scheme was a noticeably darker shade of "rail blue" (or Monastral blue according to Wikipedia) You might notice after looking at prototype photos, this model seems uncharacteristically chunky--it appears Lima stretched the Class 33's proportions to fit an existing chassis, or some other reason for freelancing the 33's proportions.

Now for the elephant in the room. This is a 2-rail unit, as you can see by this truck closeup. I thought long and hard about what it would take to make this locomotive 3-rail compatible before pulling the trigger on this auction. I've figured out something for the freight and passenger cars, but the locomotive is another ball of wax entirely. One aspect of this unit that may save me is that the wheelsets on this locomotive aren't exactly finescale. I've tilted the unit up on its side and posed a Weaver 2-rail truck next to it to demonstrate the difference. By the way, these truck sideframes aren't even remotely accurate for a Class 33, they're re-used from some other Lima model. Someone did devise a 3D printed version of an accurate truck sideframe for these, but the trucks would still have the incorrect wheelbase and spacing relative to the body Also I'm not a UK finescale modeler so neener neener .

So, not "I wanna be Proto:48"- scale, but not quite pizza-cutters either (we won't talk about those couplers). Perched atop the tubular rail of my test track, these wheels did resist token attempts to shove them sideways off the railheads, which is more than I can say for the Weaver truck

So as mentioned before, my mad plan for this unit is to convert it to 3-rail operation -- the twist being that I'll be using as much of the original chassis and running gear as possible, instead of grafting an entire Williams or Lionel chassis into the Lima shell (the latter described in this forum back in a 2012 post ). The rest of the re-engineering would consist of devising a mount for a pair of pickup rollers on the non-powered truck and mounting a basic E-unit between these improvised pickups and the motor, and if this proves successful, sticking a TMCC board in there, as there is plenty of empty space inside this cavernous body shell.

There are kits to install a CD drive motor in-place of the ring-field open-frame motor inside (I don't yet know it if works, but the loco shows little evidence of being run), giving you smoother quieter operation, at the expense of a narrower range of operating voltage -- 12 volts is the most I've heard of for these motors, and most of the ones out in the wild  are only 6v, so whomever is offering the upgrade kit  with a 12v motor really had to scrounge for them.

Now for the heavy beast. I have a lot less to say about this one since they've been made before, but no one is really talking about this so I decided to say something about mine. Here's MTH's newly-released Premier UP Challenger:

This was announced way earlier than expected -- I was keeping tabs on the real 3985 being restored at the RRHMA's facility in Silvis, IL, and was planning on getting a scale Challenger (I have a Lionmaster one) to go with my restoration-edition Big Boy when MTH announced theirs well before I expected them to. Well, it would be at least half a year before delivery so I put in a pre-order with Mr Muffins in June 2023. Much to my surprise, the locomotives arrived early in February, my invoice arrived 2/19, (paid the same day), and it arrived 2/24. I only got to take photos today in the fading late-afternoon light, so I had to use my phone, which is a bit better at low-light shots then my old Canon SX100 in the background (it's batteries collapsed before I could take any photos anyway)

[Previous: Lima "InterCity" MK1 coaches] -- [Next: Spring York 2024 - (Thursday)]

---PCJ

Mr. Muffins February auction done did it to me again   This time it was a set of New in Box (from a private collection) Lionel 18” aluminum passenger cars from 2004. As much as I like the new 21” passenger cars, I seem to have a weak spot for the 15” & 18” aluminum cars from the early 2000’s (in the last couple of years, I’ve picked up sets for D&H, PRR (Fleet of Modernism), NYC Dreyfuss). Now I can add Santa Fe - this set is 29144 and represents the El Capitan. I must say, I was surprised at just how heavy these cars are. They are quite nicely detailed and have a beautiful shine to them. As with pretty much all the other sets I’ve purchase as used or NOS, one of the cars has an issue where the lights don’t work - I’ll have to open it up and futz with the light strip to see if I can find the problem. But I am VERY happy with this purchase!!!

One downside to passenger cars of this era is that they were shipped with tight twist ties on all the trucks. From past experience, I’ve learned to just cut them instead of trying to untwist them.

Nice pieces and thank you for the tip