Happy New Year to everyone! It's been about two months since I've last posted on here, so time to catch up a little. Before I came home before Christmas not much was accomplished, with minor work being done on the Bachmann Trackster van that Bob from the Clarksville MRC gave to me. The front wheels were out of round due to crappy manufacturing, so I swapped axles and added metal wheels all around. At some future time I'll add pickups to the front wheels so all four wheels conduct electricity.
While at home I visited my old model rr club back home while in Wisconsin during their open house. At first I did some switching in our paper mill area and then took a break since a lot of guys were running their stuff on the main. I was bs-ing with one of the guys in our maintenance office and while I was out playing.... or should I say operating... someone donated three boxes of train stuff. Needless to say about half of the stuff was your typical Tyco and Model Power junk from the mid to late 70's while the other half was decent Train Miniatures, Athearn and MDC stuff. The club was in the process of thinning out their inventory as it was so they let me have first dibs. I managed to save about a dozen boxcars, about a half dozen reefers, a tank car, a flat car (this sucker looks ancient, maybe a Red Ball or earlier as it has cast metal dummy couplers and the trucks are three piece screw together brass beasts with a full cast metal frame and real wooden deck), a 2-4-0 Bowker, a AHM tiny diesel and a Mantua 0-6-0 Big Six switcher. The club, looking to thin their collection, also donated a Bachmann 0-6-0 and a boxcar that was missing a door (which I think I have a spare). With all that being said, I think I had a pretty great Christmas!
I already have a few plans for the stuff I've acquired. The club's old 0-6-0 is currently in the UP's grey stripe scheme and will be repainted for my daughter's train that I've been slowly working on for the last two years. There was also a Hershey's Tyco reefer that I grabbed for her. The Mantua Big Six will go on to the Whiskey River Railway roster as that's a locomotive I've been watching for on eBay for a while but couldn't find one under $40. It does need a connecting rod bushing to be fully operational. Many of the cars will also go on the WRRy roster while some will stay in their original paint and be used while others will hang out for future employment.
I've started disassembly on the Mantua Big Six and the AHM switcher. The drivers on the Big Six need to be quartered and with my NWSL quarterer at home as well as the bushing issue I'm setting it off to the side for now. The AHM switcher surprised the crap out of me when I popped it's shell off, the thing already had a can motor and was insulated on both sides of the frame.
It also has four wheel drive and four wheel pickup which I think I might convert this to DCC. All that I needed to do to get this thing to run fairly well was to clean the commutator and the track it was on and it ran back and forth at different speeds pretty well. However I'm not sure if I want to keep it painted in it's current paint job or not, the Soo Line number it wears (714) is actually supposed to be a GP30. We will see though.
I have also brought back a few tools to Korea, to include a set of tin snips, a jigsaw, a set of squares, a set of woodworking chisels, a pair of big clamps. Hopefully I'll have enough time to use all of them to make at least one module while I'm here. I have put the snips to work already, I've made a few removable loads for my gondolas. I'm cutting the bases for the the loads out of 1/8" aluminum which I have an abundance of since that's what the old signs are generally made out of saying who commanded units and what not. One load is general scrap and the other is a load of scrap wheels. The scrap load is just stuff from my scrap box that I figured I'll never use again mixed in with some crumpled tin foil and some other stuff. The wheel load is all my wheel sets that I've kept for a while with plastic wheels and metal axles so it was easy to remove the wheels.
Pictures will follow as Zealot is acting up and not letting me upload pictures right now.