Rebuilding C 648

I own two Pan Handle Rusty Route cabooses and one is in far better shape than the other.  I'm starting with the most distressed and in need of repair, number 648.  Built from a Silver Streak kit with full interior and lighting, the car is a fine example of what could be done by a skilled modeler in the 1960s to create a car with detail and charm.  Sadly it has seen better days, but happily the repairs needed are straightforward.

While I'd like to light this car again in order to showcase the interior work, that's not a project I want to tackle at the moment.  My goal for now is to rebuild the car to running condition, mechanically sound first, address a "weighty" issue, and get it back on the rails behind #225 within the next month.  I'll leave the roof removable for now in order to add lights eventually.

The chief mechanical defect is a frozen coupler.  I had originally planned to replace it with a nearly identical one from my parts bin but decided I had nothing to lose by trying to unstick this one.  So, I thwacked the knuckle ever so gently with a tiny hammer and it moved.  A few more taps and I could move it, stiffly, with my thumb.  I applied graphite with a mechanical pencil followed by a drop of alcohol to draw the lubricant into the joint.  That did the trick.  After scrubbing away the remaining corrosion and working the knuckle a bit more, the coupler is now functioning and ready to be reinstalled on the body.

Next I turned my attention to the supplemental weights John had added into the body.  I'm guessing the car didn't track well or perhaps didn't make reliable contact with the rails to keep the light from flickering.  Either way, he felt a bit more weight was necessary, as these lumps of lead appear to be later additions to what was a neatly laid out interior arrangement.  I decided I could keep those weights in the car by modifying the details in such a way as to hide the weight in plain sight.  

I began by milling out the cabinets under the cupola seats to accept the two largest weights.  I used a small Forstner type bit and a straight cutting bit in my Dremel tool to remove the material.  Next I cut the remaining weights into smaller bits that would replace parts of the seat and table bases, taking care to keep the weight balanced on each side of the car, as best I could.  Finally I resorted to slipping one chunk of weight between the underbody tool box and center sill.  Once painted this will be invisible from a normal viewing angle.

This is a good stopping place for this post so I'll continue the caboose repair report in the next.  Thanks for reading!

225 Rolls Again

This is the first installment of my Fall 2026 Trail Drive during which I will restore the equipment I've collected from John L. Oliver's Pan Handle Rusty Route and Earl Benteler's Allegheny.

Having successfully reorganized my workbench and created space for the staging cabinet beneath the layout, I decided it was time for another Trail Drive.  Click HERE for the post that explains the Trail Drive concept and HERE for the current posts with that label.  There's a specific reason for undertaking this particular trail drive at this time but that'll be explained in another post.  For now I'm starting with 2-8-0 #225.

The United "Santa Fe" 2-8-0 is one of the most popular brass locomotives from what some consider to be a golden era of brass imports.  John Allen had one, along with similar 2-8-0s from United based on other prototypes, and they were popular with his crews.  I can understand why.  Beautiful detail, well balanced, and no doubt when new, smooth reliable runners, sure footed and strong.

But time has not been kind to many of these models.  While this one was in excellent condition cosmetically, it ran with a significant grinding noise.  After removing the motor and gearbox - a simple matter of removing a few screws - the wheels rolled freely and the valve gear motion was smooth.  The issue was the motor and gearbox.

I had purchased a "can" motor from an eBay seller several years ago, not long after acquiring the locomotive.  I knew I'd likely be replacing the gearbox but postponed that purchase until I could get the thing on the bench and look under the hood.  Now that I'd done that I could see the model would benefit from a better gearbox but funding for that purchase is not available at present, so I'd have to make do with the new motor and some model airplane fuel tubing for a "universal" joint.

A bit of research revealed I'd be in for a challenge removing the brass collet from the gearbox shaft.  Some persistent heat and pressure from a Northwest Short Line Puller II made the task relatively painless.  I reinstalled the gearbox and after some cogitating decided it best to mount the new motor using A-Line's double sided mounting tape.  This is by no means a permanent solution but for a proof of concept it'll do nicely.

And prove the concept it did!  I made a video showing the difference in the locomotive's performance before and after the remotoring.  This is without any supplemental lubrication so I expect a slight improvement in performance with some oil.  I disabled the lights as the old cloth insulation on the wiring was a little sketchy and I didn't want to risk a short.  Someday when I upgrade the gearbox I'll probably install new lights as well but for now this is enough.

Nearly There

Does it look any different?  See this post here for the "before" images.  Beneath the layout where the two white boxes are sitting is where the "staging cabinet" is going to live.  That's a project for this Fall, and one I'm really looking forward to.

Decluttering is a skill that, when learned well and practiced regularly, is able to rewrite the brain.  The greatest takeaway from this reorganization has been the realization that I deferred way too many decisions.  That's the essence of clutter - "I'll decide later".  The more I can decide now, the easier it becomes to keep doing that, and the less cluttered my workbench becomes.

Better For Baby

In my last post I shared an image from Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Why Michigan?  Because I've been searching for prototype images of billboard refrigerator cars.  A while back I acquired a large set of card and wood sides for HO scale freezers.  I'd like to be able to categorize them by era but also learn about the details of the actual car bodies they'd have been seen on and that means research.

I'm nearly certain I've seen a prototype image of this car:

It wasn't in the Hendrickson & Kaminski "Billboard Refrigerator Cars" book.  It wasn't on the 1900-1930 Era Railroad Modelers Facebook Group.  So where did I see it?  Maybe I'm just imagining it.  Still, there should be an image out there somewhere, so I began digging around online.  Digital collections of railroad images in Michigan seemed a good place to start.  

It didn't take long to find an article on Fremont history that included an image of the Gerber factory in which one end of a GSVX freezer can be seen (Gerber Strained Vegetables).  The source for that image was a post card in the University of Michigan digital image collection.

Fremont, 1936  (citation below*)

Can you spot it?  I didn't at first.  Here's an enlargement, zoomed in on the car in question:

What does this tell me about the car?  Not much, but now I have a few clues for modeling it.  The roof is dark, as is the ladder (or grab irons...).  The hatches appear to be plain, without a larger platform around them.  The biggest unknown remains the underframe.  I'd guess either a deep fishbelly or straight steel, but this picture gives no indication.  Kits are no help here as both options were available; straight from Tenshodo or Varney, fishbelly from Red Ball.  My sides were likely made by Tenshodo.

A helpful comment on the Facebook group mentioned above indicated that the cars were listed in the ORER from 1935 to 1937, a short window of time.  These cars were built in the late 1920s but painted for Gerber in the early 30s.  The ban on billboard reefers went into effect August 1, 1934 with a grace period until January 1, 1938 before they could no longer be interchanged.  That makes this photo a rare thing, showing the car in operation.

Finally, a word about color.  Early kits offered them in the lovely two-tone blue and white but somewhere along the line Tyco made the decision to offer a pink version.  Were there pink ones in real life?  The pink/blue gender colors were suggested in 1918 and well established by the middle of the 20th century so it is possible, especially from a baby food company willing to paint dancing animals on a pastel hued car side.  I think the pink version was more likely a marketing gimmick by toy train manufacturers rather than a reflection of reality, but it would be an exciting discovery to learn they came in both colors.

*"Fremont Michigan". https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tinder/x-44719/tinder-rppc-089437. In the digital collection David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography. William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. September 13, 2026.

Shipman Choo Choo Candy Kitchen

What are the odds?  I'm browsing historic photos in the Grand Rapids Public Library, (a site that is absolutely convinced I'm a robot, btw), when I stumble across this image:

https://digital.grpl.org/Detail/objects/122671

Here is the accompanying text from the listing:

"Aerial view of the Kent Printing Company at 49 Coldbrook NE, and the surrounding neighborhood including the houses at 41 and 51 Coldbrook. In the background are buildings on Plainfield near Leonard NE, including the Shipman Coal Co., later the Choo Choo Grill, and others on the west side of Plainfield. The photo also includes the railroad yard behind the building, houses on Leonard and Barnett streets, the water treatment plant and the Grand Rapids Chair Company."

I had already spotted it, but in case it doesn't jump out at you, here's a closeup of what caught my eye:

That Jerkinhead roof over the round top window and the tall chimney on the roof could only belong to one building, the Lemon Drop Candy Kitchen.  Okay, well that's my name for a model of what in reality is now the Choo Choo Grill but in this image it was the office for the Shipman Coal Company.  Google either of those for good images.  The modern structure is where Walthers got the inspiration for the round window awnings and they also included two door types, one matching the current structure and one matching the older use, a nice nod to the structure's fit in multiple eras.  This image is from March, 1938.

So what am I doing perusing the historic images of Grand Rapids?  Looking for an image of the elusive Gerber reefer, of course, but that's a post for another time.

Out of Chaos, Opportunity Arises

According to our latest utility bill our water use had doubled each month for the past two months.  Turns out we had a leak somewhere under the house.  Considering the state of our old pipes, and not knowing exactly where the leak was, it was the right time to go ahead and replumb the whole place.  After a disruptive week of living without water during the day and sharing a bathroom every night, the leak was located and the pipe repaired. 

The pipes for the upstairs bathroom are in the den wall and ceiling.

However, in the process of ripping out and replacing all of the old pipes a minor storm of drywall dust was created and indiscriminately deposited all over the den.  The layout, my workbench, my wife's workbench, the bookshelves, my son's computer station, and everything else in this space was covered in a layer of fine powder.  Had we expected it, we would have covered the lot.  

Now, just over a week after the walls were closed up, I'm nearly done resetting the house, repainting the walls and well into a thorough cleaning of the den.  Out of this chaos comes a chance to give the space a deep cleaning.  In addition to giving it all a thorough dusting I'm planning a major change.  

It should be obvious to anyone who has followed the blog for a while that my Summer Challenge 2026 has fallen by the wayside.  I'm not all that disappointed since I've been able to accomplish many things I wanted to do instead.  Unfortunately for this blog they're not any sort of content related to model trains.  For example, I finally got the hardware installed on our kitchen cabinets.  

What has been railroad related isn't really blog-worthy either.  I've been sorting my rolling stock by era, a solid first step towards an inventory.  The first pass into large groupings was enough to show me that two things are necessary; boxes and access.  Some stock I acquired came without individual boxes and have been living together, wrapped in paper, in larger boxes.  This makes knowing what's there very difficult and sorting it even more so.  

Boxes are a simple fix.  The second thing, access, is a bit trickier.  I truly believe the foundation of contentment is gratitude for what you already have.  In order to fully appreciate these trains I need to run them.  That means they need to be accessible near the layout, not buried deep in plastic tubs out in the garage.  I have a cabinet which, after some modifications, will make a fine staging and storage area for trains but there's no room for it under the layout.  Yet.

Paint, supplies and parts.

In order to make room I'll need to find new homes for most of what's there.  Ideally, I would like to fit paints, tools and supplies in the space around my workbench, but that's going to take some careful puzzling to fit those pieces in place and a judicious culling of what doesn't need to be there.  It is time to consider what is the bare minimum I'd like to have at this bench in order to build and paint models.

The current state of things.

Hollow Brick Discovery

During my recent vacation trip to San Francisco I took a walk around the neighborhood near our motel.  At the northeast corner of Vicente Street and the Great Highway in San Francisco's Outer Sunset neighborhood I discovered this beauty:

Built in 1927, it has a fascinating history which I will leave to the reader to discover at this link.  What caught my eye was the large brickwork.  I've always thought the brick used in AHM's structures was oversized.  It is, for standard brick, but not for "hollow brick" or "hollow tile", a material that came into use in America in the 1920s but has long since fallen out of favor.  I've mentioned this material in a previous blog post on the meat market mock-up. 

This building stood out in a sea of structures known for their sameness.  Most of its neighbors are wood and stucco, all on narrow lots, shoulder to shoulder*.  But the big draw for me was the brick itself.  I had never seen it first hand and it wasn't until reviewing my photos from the trip that I realized what I had captured.  The brickwork, Deco detailing and Spanish influence seen in the porches and tile roof all combine to make this a stand-out structure worthy of prime real estate on any 1920s era model railroad.

*To be fair, there are some real architectural gems in those row houses, many with Art Deco and Streamlined Moderne styling; some preserved but most modified over the years.  See this wikipedia entry and links within for more information on the development of this area.  Blog readers might find the "Carville" link especially interesting.