Walthers American Crane initial thoughts

I found a good deal on a Walthers American Crane in Missabe paint that arrived yesterday. It is the DC Powered model, and it is a very nice looking model, forgive the poor quality image cell phone picture. It also has a couple of copper supports to keep the rigging together in transit that you can see.

I do have one big concern about it, it is very loud. I ran it on my test track (aka the kid’s DC track loop) and it had the highest pitch wine. I had thought about doing DCC conversion with a small decoder like the TCS M series but now I’m not sure. I may fiddle with it to see if I can get the noise down. If not I’m just going to pull the motor out and make it unpowered it’s really just that bad. I hadn’t planned on doing much in terms of operations with it but it would have been nice to have it powered. I can just make any moves with it as a towed piece of equipment.

It also came with a couple hook replacements, one is an electro-magnet that I’ll probably keep on it.

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Serendipity: SW1500 that wasn’t

Back in December my oldest son, 5 years old, bought a Athearn Blue Box SW1500 (it was the first locomotive he bought with his own saved up money). At about the same time I found a cheap SW1500 on Ebay for parts just in case… or at least that’s what I thought. When it arrived it definitely had different details but not being much an expert on locomotive spotting I just assumed it was because it was from an earlier run and maybe the details weren’t as correct as the one he got. I ended up not needing it for parts so I hadn’t done much with it.

Fast forward to last week I was browsing through different rail road pictures websites looking for pictures of the DM&IR and I found this picture of DM&IR 11 from 2004: http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=84603&nseq=0. It really got me intrigued because I had misinterpreted the Missabe Railroad Historical Societies all time diesel roster as having retired all EMD switchers by the mid 1960’s. What I had missed was that all the SW9s were gone by then but they acquired an NW2 rebuilt to SW1200 specs in 1998 as a shop switcher. This itself was fairly serendipitous as I am a fan of the EMD switchers and just finished scratch building a flat car used by the Missabe shops so It stood to reason I needed a shop switcher!

This brings me back to my odd Athearn switcher as I was looking to see what it would take to turn it into this NW2 switcher or at least pass-able as it. When I started comparing the details to photo I quickly realized that it was actually an NW2. Further research of photos I’ve found of DM&IR 11 and it became clear that all I really need to do to it is build platforms for the rotary beacons on the cab, replace the missing handrail, and finally paint the simple scheme on it. (Of course in addition to re-powering and putting a decoder in it).

So in the end I’d say it was pretty good luck to accidentally buy a cheap NW2 and later find it’s a near perfect match to model something I’d never be able to find (let’s face it, no one is going to mass produce a locomotive in a paint scheme where there is only one number!).

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Speeder Shed

I spent some time this afternoon working on a Clever Models speeder shed. It is nearly done, I just need to do some weathering to soften the exposed white paper surfaces. Now a speeder shed isn’t really appropriate for my era, rather my railroad would have hi-rail trucks instead. For a while now I’ve had an idea to put a model railroad museum on my CR23 free-mo module in part because I like railroad history and because it would give me a nice stealth programming track.

I had never really known what structures to use for it though, I’ve been considering the Motrak Models MOW shed (and still am) but it seems to be a speeder shed would be a great addition to any museum. The only thing I might change with the speeder shed is the base, I built the card stock version that comes with it but being a module that will, hopefully, move a lot I might try building one out of wood for durability. It will be hard to do though, this one looks really nice!