Go into the light….

I sent the better part of this evening trying (at the end, in vain) to add lighting to the interior of a Con-Cor streamlined passenger car. It seems I’m unable to make appropriate brass contacts with the sheet brass I have. Instead, I decided to put my micro-LED’s to the test! Would I be able to recreate cab lighting in my most beloved locomotive? With a soldering iron and tenacity, I found fitment and function quite quickly; It turned a passenger car failure into a prime-mover victory! In low light (which is generally how I dwell) the effect is nice, and as I have already detailed the cab interior with some very steady-handed painting techniques (black piping on the white engineer’s seat!) I wanted to show it off. My camera does not have the zoom focus to capture the interior shot i’d like, but here’s the idea-

As I hope you can see, the effect is quite nice. You’ll also notice that I seem to have foliage and trees in place as well! Yes, my layout is nearing the final stages of “completed scenery”. The plaster is drying where the roads will be found, and the glue is almost set on the 50+ trees I both produced and installed over the last 2 evenings! I’ve been quite productive, yes. Thankfully, Intermountain has some new goodies on the way so I shan’t be lacking in “eye candy” when this layout is officially unveiled as the centerpiece of the living room…..

Learning a lesson!

I have disassembled and reassembled locomotives countless times. I have tinkered, fiddled-with and messed-with more miniature things than I can remember. Sometimes, I find a glitch in the reassembly process. Last night I hooked up my new DCC controller to the small layout, and began reprogramming and running trains- I found a glitch. One of my locomotives, a venerable old Atlas Classic GP-7, was making a painful whining sound! I recall it had begun last month after a decoder install and I shelved it. “Not tonight” I thought… I wasn’t going to let that nearly-new little loco continue acting up. Fixin’ time!

Upon disassembly, I found that everything was spinning freely and in its place. There were no rubbing parts or otherwise. I had to disassemble and reassemble the locomotive four times (decoder included) before I figured it out! It was the darn bearing blocks. Four little squares of plastic that have internal “fingers” that, when installed vertically, are held against the shaft of the worm gear and create a low-friction/ low-movement environment. Without installing the bearing blocks vertically (smooth sides of each block facing you when installed in the half-frame), these little puppies will make an awful racket that will drive your basic instincts to grab a hammer! Don’t smash. Just fix.

New toys!

Let me start off by saying that I am in no way a perfectionist- I don’t have to have the nicest of anything, and I don’t have to nit-pick about little details or flaws in a product. Having said that, I do notice these things. I do recognize quality when it’s seen, and poor workmanship when it is glaring. This is not one of those times. In fact, I have to say that my recent few additions to my locomotive collection have been quite a surprise in terms of quality and detail! Of course, nobody is ever surprised when you tell them your Lexus is nice, but when you got it for the price of a Chevy Cobalt that’s when they’ll start to notice!

Anyway, thanks to the marvels of Ebay I have several new toys to talk about. Forst off, I came back from a trip to Hollywood a couple days back to find a nice little USPS box waiting for me; inside this box I found a bubble-wrapped plastic jewel case filled with about three ounces of precision-cut, laser-printed, four-axled, silver corrugated AWESOME. Kato is a company well known for their quality and detail level, and this RDC (Rail Diesel Car) is no exception! The photo below, provided by Kato, simply does not do the car justice- the included roof detail is superb, and the windows/interior look quite believable. I’m curious as to whether I’ll be able to light-up the interior when I add a DCC decoder! As of right now, I have noted two things; the headlights reverse and show white (front end) and red (back end), they can be see as 4 micro holes along the front roofline. Also the LED’s constant lighting came on at a surprisingly low voltage! The motor they use to move the light locomotive is small and hidden under the floor, with good pull and smooth acceleration. Starting and stopping is a different story though, and I imagine I’ll be playing with the speed-steps in DCC to drop the start voltage for smoother takeoffs, as well as adjust the top voltage to bring the maximum speed to somewhere below its current 1 thousand miles per hour…. 😉  Despite the quirks, $40 well spent indeed.

 

My second new toy is a similarly striking and detailed model of, by many accounts, the most important diesel-electric locomotive ever built. I am talking, of course, about the Electro-Motive Company’s  FT locomotives. (Two separate links for the EMC and the FT’s, also diesel-electric is longhand for “diesel” as the engine powering the locomotive only actually powers the electric traction motors in the axles of each truck which means there is no mechanical link from the diesel engine to the motive power of the engine)

These first-generation locomotives had only ever been offered as N scale models in brass, and the good people at Intermountain Railway Models decided it was time to change that. Their tooling on prior locomotives was impeccable, and I truly believe that their FT’s are another line on a long list of “oh wow!” N scale models. The set I purchased was an Ebay last minute bargain, and worth every penny (and then some!). I purchased the set, brand new from a reputable seller, for $71. That’s less than half of their retail price! How could I resist? The Santa Fe Warbonnet scheme happens to be in my top three all-time favorite schemes; I was actually impressed by the color richness and paint detail when it arrived! The photo above clearly shows the details of the separate metal-wire grab irons, and the side grates along the top of the locomotive are etched brass. The headlight’s color and brightness are stunning, and the smoothness of its starting and creeping leaves me wondering if it’ll ever get much better? I’ve not heard a quieter locomotive, save for maybe the Intermountain FP-7 set I also call mine!

The FT was a unique locomotive for several reasons- one of which being its odd, almost haphazard-looking truck spacing. The trucks are set-out almost to the ends of the A locomotive, but only on one end for the B! The reasons for this are long-winded, suffice it to say it’s unique and quite an attention getter at eye-level compared to most other diesels I have seen. Another feature EMC offered was the drawbar coupling between units. While it may look like two separate locomotives above, EMC had designed, build and shipped most FT sets as a set, referred to as one locomotive. The new 16-cylinder diesel engines inside the locomotives were simply too large to house in one road locomotive without extending it further than the design called for; a second locomotive AKA a booster was added to carry the extra horsepower. A drawbar permanently coupled the sets as an A-B configuration, but Santa Fe and several other railroads ordered theirs as a coupler-linked, non-permanent set. While this impacted the number of train crews required, it allowed more switching and servicing flexibility for the roads who ordered their FT’s separatable. Of course, the one flaw with the Intermountain unit is it does not properly reflect this detail in its lack of an end window for the engineer to operate the B loco independently. Other than that, I’ll simply say this- these locomotives are stellar, and deserve a place on any transition-era layout. Heck, I’d put them in a display case if I wasn’t running my set all the time. A big thank you for Intermountain on this one!