Happy Christmas everybody.
For the past several weeks I have been tinkering again. My first go at making a SG Railbus was posted here; later I tried again and showed you the movie at this link, with a follow-up here.
Okay, so now my third attempt. This beast started out life as a McCoy yellow-and-brown "Denver" convention combine car, and a matching "New Orleans" convention observation. I used a 1:18 scale diecast truck cab and powered it with an MTH trolley motor truck. After viewing the earlier video of my Ives Railbus, Popi suggested having it pull a trailer car. So here you are Popi, this one is a twofer.
I really like this version, everything seemed to come together really well. On a whim, Arno (modenerasg) designed the triangle herald for this overnight. I've always liked the old "New York New Haven & Hartford" herald and thought that the initials of my layout lent themselves to a similar repetition, but I'd never gotten very far with it. I think Arno did a beautiful job, nice to have such artistically talented friends! My dad's initials were HHC, and since it was his old Ives that got me started with trains, I named my railroad to have his initials - the HHCRR. The "hayloft" part comes from the layout's location on the upper floor of an old barn that I renovated here on the farm.
The second doodlebug in this movie, after the McCoy makeover, is something I made from an old tinplate Cragstan friction toy bus, powered it with a modified G Scale DC motor. This was really fun, the bus is a perfect size for SG. It's very lightweight though - might need some more weight for better traction. I made some gosh-awful headlights for it out of your basic Lionel station interior light shade.
And then, some while back I saw these on the auction site,
It was being sold as a McCoy-made prototype for a reproduction of the Lionel 2-7/8 #800 "jail car" locomotive, which had been partially assembled by Herb Morley before the project was abandoned. Have no way of knowing if the story is true: but if so, I can see why they decided not to go there. Dozens of tiny little pieces, it took me many hours of soldering, and also fabricating a few pieces that weren't there, like door slide tracks, corner poles, and control rods.
Anyway, got it together, decided on green instead of the traditional maroon, and powered it with another MTH trolley motor truck. Here it is, as the third vehicle in this video. It's pretty large scale, being for 2-7/8, but it fits in okay. Something different.
Enjoy! (to view the video large-screen, right-click on the little blue square in the bottom right corner with the two little arrows; and select "open frame in new window".)
- david
