A Few More Hoppers

Here are a few new hoppers to join the fleet.

The Nickel Plate Road twin hopper is an Accurail product decorated with CDS Lettering dry transfer.

The New Haven hopper is an old Life-Like car also decorated with CDS Lettering dry transfer. It is a car from Jérôme's original childhood trainset. It's back to its rightfull owner in a new livery. I kept the original trucks but installed body mounted Kadee coupler pockets.

Pennsylvania 46ft Gondolas

A new pair of gondolas are weathered and ready to hit the rails. I'll probably weather the wood deck a little bit more with powders. I used the habitual technics including oil paint, acrylic washes and weathering powders.

Pennsylvania Coal Hoppers

I completed a set of two Walthers Trainline 2-bay coal hoppers. Both were originally painted in Southern Pacific scheme and were repainted and relettered to PRR using CDS Lettering dry transfer. Also, all cast on grabirons were removed and replaced with thin 0,25mm styrene stripes.

Weathering is a mix of powders and light alcohol based washes. Simple, but it does the job. I made sure the weathering wasn't exactly identical on both car to better represent variety among the fleet.

New Power to Harlem: Erie #320

While things seem calm at Harlem, beware! I recently repainted an Atlas (old DC tooling) Alco S2 in Erie colors. This new switcher will replace the boxcab until it is ready to hit the rail.

I didn't bother to superdetail the locomotive since it was the operator's wish to keep thing simple and sturdy. Decals came from different diesel and steam sets by Microscale.

The headlight lense was missing but found it in the junk box after.

A light weathering was done according to prototype pictures to represent a well-maintained and fairly recent locomotive. While not a prize-winning model, I'm pretty sure it will gave hours of flawless operation due to its excellent drive. For your information, it is the Grand Trunk Western switcher a few of you spotted on previous operation pictures.

Meanwhile, I can announce the entire freight car fleet is now assembled. I need to weather about 16 cars and I'll consider this huge undertaking done once for all.

New Trainset Freigth Cars

The flow of second hand trainset freight cars seems to be never ending... in apparence at least. Louis-Marie's brother-in-law provided an old trainset from his childhood. While most of the stuff was garbage, even in the eyes of someone with low standard, a few cars were worth a second life.

Among them was a Tyco MoW flatcar. If you remove the pseudo-caboose end, you get a decent car. By the way, even as a child, I always found these cars to be highly dubious. Any prototype? As for the caboose, was it a bobber shell plugged onto a flat car... It's really weird.

 Another one was a generic 50ft flatcar. It was broken in two but could be repaired easily. It used to have holes on the deck to secure containers.

 
Finally, the last decent car was a 40ft Bachmann boxcar. While in really bad shape, this car has details that can compare with Athearn and Roundhouse except for the obvious lack of steel panel line. In fact, some of them are superior, particularly the roofwalk which is thin and well rendered for a 40-year model. However, the car has some serious defects, lack doors, door tracks, brake wheel and is broken.

All of them are in the process of being rebuilt and repainted. The flatcars will become Nickel Plate Road while the boxcar will be of Pittsburg & Lake Erie origin.

With these latest acquisition, I consider the fleet to be complete and want to thanks every people involved in building it.

I still have a few weeks of building, painting and weathering ahead. Some cars will likely require fine tuning, addition weight and metal wheels. For hoppers, I'm still investigating ways to add weight. At this point, I know the answer won't be aesthetical.

On the positive side, I'm glad to announce the illustrated rolling stock catalogue is progressing well. I hope to start publishing the content during the month of September.