Weekend Update 10/11/26

[InterurbanModels]

This weekend, my musings turned to the Soo Line. Motive power arrived recently and asked for matching rolling stock. First I made a "generic" combine in Soo Line Tuscan, and then a specific Soo Line car, modeled after a Soo Line diagram of modernized "First Class Coaches". Those coaches were shorter than usual 12 wheelers, and had a characteristic window arrangement.

[packers#1]

This is becoming a postage stamp scene

Thanks Chuck!

I added more grasses and some flowering spots from Woodland Scenica for more texture today, as well as some more trees and a first pass at the weathering on the roof of the fertilizer plant. It looks really good in person but the contrast is a bit starker on my phone camera. I’m going to play around with the trees around the road a bit more, and I’m trying to decide what else I want to do before cleaning off the layout for some ops and pivoting to some rolling stock weathering and logo projects again. But I’ll just go until I get too tired and start again. One things for sure, when I do the lot for the transload spots I’ll also add another skim on the surface of the dirt lot; most of the grout set but some edges and spots are a bit more crumbly.



I don’t have any locos weathered yet, but here we see TPW 4055 nosing up to an empty covered hopper at Tri-county Fertilizer’s Powdersville plant on RailAmerica’s Foothills RR in Upstate South Carolina. They sent the 4055 down to supplement the older power now that a cement distributor opened up a little further up the line, increasing train weight and car count and requiring more horsepower.

[Lemosteam]

One last test build before it is available for purchase. This model represents an early PRR B60b with pinheaded vents and 2D-P3 trucks.

From the Harley Archives:



My model of it:

 

[chessie system fan]

I've had an eventful weekend so far. The hurricane knocked my power out yesterday about 5pm.  That late in the day, about the only good source of light left was in the middle of my workshop, so I decided to mock up my next T track module.  This one will have a local "deep South in the summer" flavor and is inspired by the St. Elmo CSX/L&N line near me.  After a few iterations, I've decided on a road (the wooden board) and a corn field. The carpenter's square itself will be the edge of the field. Inside the square will be the corn row part. Andrea Doria came to see why I was ignoring her.  She was unimpressed by my progress.



Today, with my power still not restored, I elected to escape to my CofG HO friend's house and work on the layout I'm building for him. This time, I focused on the upper level by trimming the plywood, finalizing the track plan, and laying down the cork roadbed.



Once I finished that, I put the turnouts back in place and found I had a kink in the runaround track that required shifting some turnouts.  I'll fix that next time.



I came home around 9:40PM to find my power back on. 

[wm3798]

Played around with some fresh custom decals a few of us WM guyz have been collaborating on.



The colors, fonts and resolution have been tweaked through several iterations  very satisfactory results.

Nevermind my slightly wavy installation....  Time was I had mad skills for this type of work.  Now I have skills that just make me mad!

Hopefully the other side will go better, or at least well enough  to pass the 3 feet away at speed test!

Either way, a vast improvement over the crappy Tichy decals I paid way too much for.
Thanks,  @Jesse6669 !

Lee

[Brian M]

After sitting dormant for quite a while, I've just posted some updates to my South Bergen Industrial layout build thread to share what I'm up to these days.

One thing I've been playing around with is making a set of custom turnouts for a section of my layout where the track geometry needs a fairly broad curve to make the best use of the space.  I saw the idea on the Model Railroad Hobbyist forum of using flex track to make a pencil rubbing of the desired turnout, so I figured I'd give it a try.  Granted, this is the easy part, but I like how it's looking so far!



More on my updated build thread:
https://www.therailwire.net/forum/index.php?topic=46699.15

-Brian.

[Jesse6669]

Played around with some fresh custom decals a few of us WM guyz have been collaborating on.

The colors, fonts and resolution have been tweaked through several iterations  very satisfactory results.

Nevermind my slightly wavy installation....  Time was I had mad skills for this type of work.  Now I have skills that just make me mad!

Hopefully the other side will go better, or at least well enough  to pass the 3 feet away at speed test!

Either way, a vast improvement over the crappy Tichy decals I paid way too much for.
Thanks,  @Jesse6669 !

Lee

Looking good!

 

[arbomambo]

Adding Woodland Scenics double arm power poles…

Final stretch… adding the power/telephone poles to each “Arbo Canyon” triple.

Not as simple as it appears as each package only contains 4 strung poles; which means I must break up another package to provide the two extra poles that go on each triple.

This necessitates having to ‘string’ the extra line through the tiny holes on the cross arms on the two extra poles.

  Fortunately, WS provides a line threading tool that works surprisingly well to assist in this. It works exactly like a threading needle.

[muktown128]

One last test build before it is available for purchase. This model represents an early PRR B60b with pinheaded vents and 2D-P3 trucks.

From the Harley Archives:



My model of it:

 

This might be a little nitpicky, but it looks like the rain gutters above the doors are a little too long and low on the 3D printed version compared to the proto photo.  I didn't notice this until you posted the side by side photos.  I'll hazard a guess that there was some variation in the length and position of the gutters on the prototype B60b's.  A quick search of photos on line shows the gutters didn't extend past the doors, but there does seem to be some variation on how high or low they were.  Not sure if shortening the gutters is a quick fix or worth the effort.

[Jim Starbuck]

A month or so ago @Chris333 sent me a photo of Hoboken Shores #3 and a dare. Can it be built? There’s a great article in the March 2004 issue of Mainline Modeler with photos and dimensional drawings of this 1906 Baldwin traction motor.
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Scaled that there was enough room for a 6x15 motor and Bachmann 44 tonner trucks had the right axle spacing so away we go. Chris did amazing design work producing several iterations of a highly detailed body and printable chassis. Absolutely the lion’s share of work to get this all to work. I settled on the aforementioned motor fitted with brass worms from a parted out Kato 11-10x chassis which seem to work nicely. Chris also experimented with several printed worms to find the sweet spot as everything is quite compact here. With some fiddle work I had a mechanism that tested well as Chris continued to tweak the design.
This locomotive started life in Hoboken working the waterfront moving freight to warehouses from offloaded steamships. When that work slowed the locomotive was sold (here’s the cool part) to the Clinton, Davenport & Muscatine railroad in 1930. The Clinton part being my hometown where I still live. This is the paint scheme I modeled for obvious reasons.
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Now as #77 it worked the roughly 26 mile stretch between Clinton and Davenport intil 1940 when it was sold to Capital Transit Co. in Washington DC serving the Benning power station until it’s closure and scrapping in 1955.
Here’s my first version. There will be others. A HUGE thanks to Chris for making this happen!
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And a short video.

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