Trail Drive 2020 Complete!

HeeYAH! (make your own whip cracking noise here.  Humming the theme from "Rawhide" quietly to yourself while you read this is entirely up to you).  The Trail Drive which began in 2020 has now reached the end. 

Engine #145, an IHC Mehano 2-6-0, has been customized, rebuilt, detailed, painted, lettered and weathered.  Two Comet refrigerator cars were built; one from a complete kit, another from a basket case.  Each was upgraded with additional weight and better parts selected to be in keeping with the age of the cars (nearly 80 years old).  Finally, two toy-train quality Model Power cabooses were rebuilt with new cupolas, end details and trucks plus assorted other details to become the Ocali Creek Railway's first official crummies.

This engine gave me fits at times.  I would not recommend this as a first-time rebuilding project.  The IHC mechanism is fine but on this particular model the frame is ever so slightly warped and has a couple minor design flaws acceptable for a toy train but not for a more refined model expected to operate.  Pulling power is low, as others have reported, but adequate for this engine's duties.  For now on this railroad it will be serving the industries at Ocala Spings on extras or replacing 158 when it is in the shops.  Eventually when the rest of the branch is built it will haul the daily passenger train...once the passenger cars are built, that is.

This is the former basket case.  Now I believe it is one of the most unique and characterful models I own.  Accurate for the 1920s (to the best of my knowledge), it is emblematic of the reasons I chose to model this era.  Matching the color was nearly impossible but rebuilding the car and adding details was all fun.  I'm especially pleased with the open ice hatches.

Oh how I hated to weather this car, but boy howdy am I happy with how it turned out.  Thanks to Eric Hansmann for posting a great prototype photo on his blog.  From that image I learned that for my era the ends of the car should be white, the number of roof panels (and other details) varied from car to car, and just how filthy these cars would get in service.  There were many of these cars in service so having one is just about essential.  Comet kits can build up into nice cars IF you substitute better parts for the underbody, roof, ice hatches, well, just about everything except the core and the sides.

Finally the cabooses.  Cabeese.  Cabeeses?  Two of 'em.  I didn't set out to build two but early on acquired a second kit and from that point began collecting the parts for the upgrades.  I chose #3 and #4 to contribute to the story of the railroad's history.  Purchased second hand (like engine 145) they were rebuilt in the Ocali Creek's shops as the railroad grew.  At some point I'll model #1, probably a 4-wheel bobber, and maybe #2...or maybe #2 got wrecked...we'll see.  Anyway, this car and its twin will work the "Park Shifter", based out of East Ocala yard and serving the industries at Ocala Springs.

While I started this personal challenge back around Christmas, each of these projects had begun much earlier, with the caboose project reaching back over four years ago before we moved back to California.  It feels great to have hit this milestone and I really like the idea of completing a set of trains - an engine, rolling stock and caboose.  I'm not sure when the next Trail Drive will happen, but I already have some ideas for what I'll work on; the Pan Handle Rusty Route equipment I purchased a couple years ago and my own Shifter project I started back in the early 2000s.   Or perhaps a passenger train?  Who knows.  For now the focus shifts to structures and scenery for the railroad.

Trail Drive Nearing Completion

 

Next stop, WEATHERING!  The freezers are ready to roll, the cabeese still need window glass but won't get it until the weathering has been applied, and the steamer will receive a bell cord and whistle cord after weathering.  Note the coal load in the tender.  I will be using multiple techniques; brush painting, air brushing, and adhesive powders, as required, to get the look I'm after.  I may also include a few other cars that need weathering, or maybe not.  We'll see.

Comet Freezer Progress

 ...and a Twelve Days Trail Drive update!

The white body without sides is the Baby Ruth car.  In my color tests I found I got a better match to the original sides when painting the orangey-red over white.  The gray car will have white ends and they're actually primed white though they're hard to see in these shots.  The undersides of both cars will be black and once the primer is cured a bit longer I'll tape off the body and hit both with rattle can black.  The roof of the gray-primed car will be Tuscan Red so it will need a second masking before that color will be airbrushed on.

If you look closely at the second image (right-click and open in a new tab to see it much larger) you'll see my simplified brake rigging.  I tried to make brake levers from styrene and attach it to the center sill, along with a clevis formed from half a Tichy turnbuckle, my usual approach.  Neither worked very well, and in the interest of time I just bent wire and glued it into a hole in the sill.  Done and dusted.  Another simplifying step was using the original grab irons pulled from the Baby Ruth car as roof walk supports at the end of each car.

Okay, on to the update.  These cars are coming along nicely and are on track to be complete by Christmas.  The cabooses are not as far along but could be ready if - and its a big IF - I really push through and make good progress each day.  I'd rather not push too hard.  I'm really pleased with how these projects are all coming together, but I'm also taking time to enjoy the seasonal fun like decorating the house, making treats and playing games with my family.  We're getting nice sunny weather and I like puttering about in my garden, tidying the beds.  So I'm planning on extending this personal challenge into the actual Twelve Days of Christmas, with January 6, 2021 the new target date.

Look for an end-of-year review and resolutions post soon.  Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a blessed holiday season.

Questions Answered - Model Railroad Research

I really enjoy model railroad research.  Note I didn't say prototype research - that's a related discipline that often overlaps, but it isn't quite the same.  Sometimes you can't find any prototype information, or the book that might contain that nugget you seek isn't in your library or is too darn expensive.  That's when turning to the previous versions of the model might help.  It is also fun to look into the history of the hobby.

When I was in seminary I learned about researching textual variants in ancient fragments of scripture.  Usually you went with the oldest known text, whether it was a papyrus fragment or potsherd inscription.  But often you'd find a greater weight of evidence in say, vellum copies.  Though the papyrus may be older, it may not carry the same authority because there are so many copies of the variant text.  Which do you choose as the basis for translation?

So too with model railroad freight cars.  When a manufacturer, long out of business, produced a freezer* ages ago and advertised they used the car builders diagrams, then that's a pretty good source.  But when another manufacturer makes a copy and varies the details, like using a different color scheme or using a different roof type, and they produce thousands of them, which then get copied by other manufacturers, what do you do?  With no actual prototype data available, which source do you trust to build your version of that freezer?

It is possible the second manufacturer chose to change the model based on their available dies for casting parts rather than incur the cost of making new ones.  Maybe they changed the color scheme to make it less gaudy in the hopes it might sell better.  Or maybe they didn't have much prototype data either!

Re-kitted freezer ready to rebuild.

For the two Comet freezers I'm building as of the writing of this post, I needed to know more before I could add better details.  What type of underframe?  Likely fishbelly.  Ladders or grabs?  Ladders. Et Cetera.  For the MDT car I had good prototype photos thanks to Eric Hansmann and other like-minded researchers.  But the Baby Ruth car?  Only one colorized image - the cover of Hendrickson's Billboard Refrigerator Cars book.  Ends, sides, ladders, underframe all visible in that image.  But what about the roof?  The hatches?

Here's where the kit helps out.  My car came to me already built - thankfully not too damaged and assembled well enough - but the original would have contained hints for the roof on the card from which you punched out the sides and ends (and hatches).  Enter eBay.  A quick search of previously sold items turned up an image that helped.

Read the fine print.  Use magnification if necessary.

Right there on the carrier sheet it says, "NO ROOF RIBS    RED SIDE LADDERS".  This note was obviously missed by many modelers who decided to put ribs up there anyway, as evinced by other eBay searches for this car, even the one I'm rebuilding.  But no matter.  In this great hobby we all get to make creative choices that suit our fancy and build models to our heart's content.

*I use the term freezer instead of the more common reefer for a couple reasons - for a while in the early days of this hobby it was the term de rigueur, like saying pike instead of layout.  But in my current NorCal context "reefer" also has a meaning that I don't care to reference.  I know, most readers of this blog know the difference; I just prefer "freezer", in the same way some men like to wear vests.