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highpeak

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  1. We'll sit and wait for the flood of pictures showing OO-P compliant stock running on layouts then alongside HO stuff. Any compromises in the track will be ignored because compromises are OK if they suit Andy's purpose. BTW, Joe Fugate's "self-promoting" article? Bit rich that, coming from you. I did see though that you credit him with the idea on your website for the kit of parts you sell to use CV track bases as a jig. Very generous of you.
  2. You have quite a habit of drawing false conclusions from posts with which you disagree. I did not say British OO gauge as a whole concept was BS. I said your proposal to adopt the P4 standard for wheels while retaining the compromised gauge standard and then to run the "improved" British-prototype models on track that would presumably not resemble any kind of British track was BS. There's quite a difference there which you choose to ignore. In other threads liberally scattered on the site (mostly in North American and Handbuilt track) you have been adamant that track deserves to be modeled accurately regardless of any other criteria, yet in this thread you don't seem to care what the track looks like as long as the models can negotiate it. For instance, you've lambasted Joe Fugate's method of turnout construction because it involves compromises that to you are not acceptable (post 11 http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/94425-a-different-idea-for-a-switching-layout/). What you are now promoting would appear to involve similar compromises at least in respect of some of the locomotives and rolling stock that would be operated over it, which is why I think most people are not accepting the idea.
  3. I think a fairly large percentage of the 3,321 views (at the time of posting) of this thread are from people bemused at the concept of marrying a scale 4mm wheel profile with a scale 3.5mm track gauge. There have been a couple of posts, one of them mine, noting that the slimmer wheel tread would look odd when set to 16.5mm track back to back in a 4mm scale bogie, but nowhere near as odd as British rolling stock running on presumably US track. You have in other places gone to great lengths to propose that track be modeled as accurately as the rolling stock, and yet in this thread you throw all that out the window in support of a completely bastardized track standard. Which leads me to agree entirely with Gordon. I would in fact go further and state that you are taking BS to new levels, and I don't mean British Standards either.
  4. I think if you put a P4 wheel set in most commercial 4mm or 3.5mm truck frames and set the wheel set to 16.5 gauge it would look a little odd because the eye would register (from the 3/4 view) a noticeable gap between the face of the wheel and the frame that isn't there when the wheel is over scale and set to a narrower gauge or when the scale wheel is set to a scale gauge. The same thing would happen with HO scale steam engines. The compromise in HO is in the engine, not the track. I have a 2-8-2 freight engine that looks reasonable enough until you measure it and discover that the engine is a scale one foot too wide over the cylinders. If you reduce the wheels to a thinner scale tread size, I would imagine it will look a bit silly because the compromise in the width of the engine will suddenly be very visible, whereas the eye is fooled a bit by the over scale wheels.
  5. I would imagine for your prototype/period rail would typically be in 39ft. lengths. Earlier periods had used 30 and then 33ft lengths, some roads had used longer rails but discovered handling could be a problem when a lot of track maintenance required manual labor. The Norfolk and Western was starting to use continuous welded rail in the 1950s, see http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1950/09/03/page/48/article/the-welded-rail Rails worn at the ends could be cropped to remove the wear typical at joints, so you might find shorter lengths especially on secondary lines. Source: NMRA reprint of Railway Track and Maintenance manual from the late 1920s, and the Chicago Tribune article, which I thought displayed a reasonably technical grasp of the topic. There are a number of sources for joint bars including Andy Reichert's Proto 87 stores and Details West. Central Valley makes some nice parts for adding detail to turnouts. A little work allied with observations from period photographs can go a long way to improving RTR track.
  6. A benefit of being an old f*rt is a long memory and, if you are lucky, some useful back issues of railway magazines. Now I think my googling skills are good enough to identify Mr. Angry, and my magazine collection happens to include a 1993 Railway Modeller where this gentleman described a railway layout built for exhibition where he admits that half the stock was out of the box. Some of the rest simply received a swipe of a paintbrush to weather it. I will credit him with having made some progress in the intervening years, but he really should pause a moment to see where he came from before launching forth on a tirade aimed at those who buy RTR products. His literary style at the time is perhaps described as "cringeworthy", the progress of time has moved him on to "abrasive and rude".
  7. One option might be thin card or styrene and then the Archer rivet decals? You may need to cut them up a bit, but they are perhaps a bit quicker and easier than the noggins of styrene approach, not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that.
  8. There's a thread elsewhere on here wants to know how many modelers never built a Superquick kit. I'm guessing here, but I bet Mirek didn't. Unbelievably skillful modeling in a medium that I doubt most of us would think of using for this purpose.
  9. I think Simon has an excellent point: you should perhaps spend some time reflecting on what you are really looking for. I think it was Iain Rice in one of his books who suggested spending time browsing picture books to find something that appealed, and that's what I did. The books in question were the Morning Sun trilogy on Maine Central. There was never any question which road I would model, but I spent a long time trying to work out what aspects of the road appealed and what would fit into my available space (roughly comparable to your shed, a bit wider but not as long.) In the end, it wasn't the pictures that gave me ideas, but the excellent narrative that accompanied them and gave me an insight into what each train was doing. It would take a shrink to decide what it is about somewhat isolated, end of the line places that appeals to me, but it worked out well because there's really only space for a US equivalent to a branch line terminus anyway. So I set about creating a plausible settlement at the end of a north country branch line a bit similar to Beecher Falls but with the stone quarries that lay further north moved into the scene. So my muse turned out to be attracted to a sense of place and a story behind the trains. Perhaps a spell of introspection along similar lines might be worthwhile.
  10. The G&W never of course got anywhere near WY the state. Their objective was more likely Wyoming, NY which proved to be equally elusive. Linking upstate NY to WY would have been a tough challenge for any road. It should have been easier to link Colorado to Wyoming, but while the Colorado and Wyoming managed to operate in both states it didn't actually connect them. They had several disconnected operations and the WY one was quite a long way from CO. Perhaps "Colorado or Wyoming" might have been a better road name. At least they seem to believe in painting their engines as opposed to running the scruffy patched up eyesores that are quite common on many roads.
  11. The thread on the RDCs prompted me to take a look through my old slide collection and I was struck by how well Rapido's recent choices fit in to at least the Northeastern US, and how long-lived some of the engines were. New Haven and successor company modelers have done especially well here, there's a good start to modeling both MBTA and Metro North territory. It's not all done for you though, those shiny Amtrak engines weathered fairly quickly. There's quite a few miles on this engine at route 128 in the summer of 1980:
  12. If you are into MBTA, you'll have to beg Jason for one of these. He can add in the steam heat effects too. South Station on Boxing Day, 1980
  13. CT DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) uses the terms roundabout, rotary and circular intersection interchangeably in its driver's manual, and sets a very straightforward rule: traffic in the roundabout has priority. That said, we really don't have that many of them. There are a couple about 10 miles up the road on CT route 80. Quite why they were built instead of the stop signs/traffic signals that control all the other intersections on that 20 mile stretch of road is a bit of a mystery. It's fairly rural and I am not aware of any traffic issues that urgently needed attention. I doubt they would make any difference to traffic problems here in the Constipation Constitution State to be honest. Out neighbors to the north in the Commonwealth of MA went in for them in a fairly big way but if it improved things up there, our DOT wasn't listening. Mind you, this is an outfit that has said traffic light sequencing wouldn't work in CT either, though they didn't explain why. Their specialty is more in spreading asphalt wherever they can, hence the name "Department of Tarmac".
  14. Maine Central passenger trains between Portland ME and St. Johnsbury, VT had to do the kind of reversal in each direction Simon describes in order to call at the Boston and Maine depot, the MEC depot having been closed. An extension brake hose and valve allowed the conductor a degree of control if the need arose. Depending on direction the train would either cross the diamond and then back down to the depot for its station stop, then pull forward again to resume its trip, or head in to the depot before backing out and crossing the diamond. I do like the wye arrangement Simon suggests if it can be arranged.
  15. I went to Steamtown a couple of weeks ago on a rather raw day, mostly to have a look at the Maine Central 2-8-0 which turned out to be buried among the "diamonds in the rough" and not really accessible for pictures. It turned out to be a good day because I got a personal tour of the workshops since nobody else was there. Before that I took a few pictures of a PRR boxcar that had been tidied up and placed near the entrance to the buildings. These pictures may help somebody trying to improve a less-detailed model or they may just answer some questions about how things are arranged. This picture shows how the brake line is attached to a bracket and not glued to the floor of the car. At the other end of the car you can see the way the cut lever is attached to a bracket. This photograph shows some detail of the brackets at the end of the centre sill around the coupler, the hand brake linkage and the brake retainer pipe. Finally, looking up at the running board you can see the brackets that secure it to the car at the end.
  16. As Adrian said, what shows up depends largely on what your presumed traffic flows are. I just quoted those roads to show a rough ratio of the 40'/50' boxcar fleet. And even that might not be entirely relevant, your traffic might require a disproportionate number of bigger cars compared to the overall ratio. The era you have chosen is often thought of as being rather drab. It's true that most boxcars were painted some shade of boxcar red, but there was a tremendous degree of variety within the boxcar fleet once you got past the colours.
  17. Obviously you are a long way from starting to accumulate rolling stock, but I wouldn't go overboard with making 40' boxcars look too disreputable. If you look at pictures from the era: -almost no graffiti. Chalk marks relating to traffic purposes are about all I can see in the pictures in "The Postwar Freight Car Fleet" (Kline and Culotta, published by NMRA). There may be some other scribbling, but it's not obvious that it's graffiti. Markings on the lower parts of the car, think about where a worker standing on the ground would be able to reach. -I don't know if the pictures in the book were selected for being undamaged, but the cars are generally in good repair. New 40' cars were still being built in your time period, and the railroads had bought or rebuilt quite a lot of equipment in the late 40s after the war ended - 40' boxcars were very much the majority. According to the January 1953 ORER the Milwaukee had 27,061 40' boxcars of various types and 3,283 50' (or longer). For other roads: Rock Island 18,294/1,754; UP23,156/3,969; PRR 57,922/9,197; ATSF 33,199/5,109; NYC 61,518/7,065 I think the 40' car thing helps with a small layout, the occasional 50' car could make life more interesting.
  18. Adrian makes a good point re the snow. Those heaps of snow take a long time to melt and Chicago isn't noted for balmy winters. There is a lot of scope for reflecting cold weather without making the whole thing a snow scene, frozen puddles for instance. You could look at some of Mike Confalone's work for portraying the kind of cold, snowed a couple of days ago look. Heaps of plowed and frozen snow would be interesting challenges in terms of shape and colouring.
  19. There's a lot of misconceptions about the BL1/2 engines, some of them apparently coming from EMD themselves, relating to mu equipment, controls and so on. For a small group of engines they have a lot of history. They always remind me of a doleful looking hound dog for some reason. I checked the A Line web site http://www.ppw-aline.com/ and it says they won't ship outside the USA, which is a shame because they make some useful stuff. I like their thin lead sheet for adding weight to gondolas or 16T mineral wagons where it can be hard to get any weight if you are running them empty. They also do some useful small chain. And of course all the repowering/spares. NorthWest Short Line also does replacement gears but they are quite expensive. I'd look at raiding old blue box engines first.
  20. I have had the split gear problem on a couple of engines that I bought as new old stock. They hadn't turned a wheel, the gears were split when I took them out of the box. Besides Athearn, A-Line makes replacement gears which is what I bought when I came upon them by chance at a hobbyshop in Palmer, MA. There are a lot of BL2s in preservation relative to the number built, in some part due to the longevity of the engines on Bangor and Aroostook. The BL2 wasn't especially lightly built, really it was an F3 with a different carbody. Some of them (e.g., the Boston and Maine engines) didn't have mu equipment but that was more to do with the intended use of the engines. The 5 B&M engines were equipped with steam generators for passenger service. While the BAR engines were bought to replace steam on branchlines, in later years they were used pretty indiscriminately in multiple with the rest of the road's first generation diesels. The BAR repainted one of the BL2s in the original paint scheme, I was fortunate enough to catch it at Northern Maine Jct outside Bangor before they added the name "American Railfan" which somewhat spoiled the effect.
  21. I think Simon is absolutely spot on there, I've never seen a more model-like picture of a real engine. You'd swear the lighting was artificial. It's a great photo but it does look like top-quality modeling.
  22. I liked the joke that said SPSF stood for Shouldn't Paint So Fast
  23. The scenario you just described is to me what makes railways so interesting, and food for thought when designing a layout. You are spot on with the way you can plausibly account for the appearance of foreign road equipment, and it goes back way before the current era. Back in the late 50s the Bangor and Aroostook needed a few additional engines, mostly to cope with seasonal traffic in potatoes, but could not justify the investment. The problem was neatly solved by working a deal with the Pennsylvania RR whereby the Pennsy would lease engines to cope with a rush in ore traffic off the Great Lakes, that traffic wound down during the BAR's spud season, so the engines could go home and haul potatoes. Nice picture of a BAR engine working on the Pennsy at http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=354678&nseq=0
  24. Not sure how Ethan Allen got down to Arkansas! The baby boats were used very intensively, mostly on the Mountain sub-division over to St. Johnsbury or on the Rigby to Bangor run. They did occasionally show up on some of the branch lines, but not very often. They very quickly became railfan favourites. By the mid to late 70s MEC needed more power, in large part because the Alco switchers were getting very tired, and the GP7s had been around a long time too. The baby boats were part of the solution, but for the rest the MEC went picking through boneyards for bargains. There was a curious precedent for MEC to end up with former RI power: in 1965 two former RI RS-3s were leased by MEC from GE and saw service for about a year. The Rock had traded them in on...the batch of U25s of which 14 ended up being bought by MEC. Some of the engines went into service pretty quickly. The 234 seemed to be the best of the bunch and as you note ran around for quite a while in RI blue. She was a celebrity in the railfan world and predictably was nicknamed Rocky, laying over here at Rigby: Another engine that went into service in RI colors was the 231, seen here in the train that delivered them up to Waterville: The other celebrity in the bunch, but for more or less the opposite reason to Rocky was the Great Pumpkin. This was a bit of a rush job by Waterville and it looked as though the paint had been applied at night with a yard broom, no stripes either: The U25s seemed huge, and in fact were somewhat restricted as to where they were used, mostly between Portland and Bangor or up the Rumford branch, often on the very heavy wood job out of Waterville. The other second hand engines bought during the second hand buying spree were four ex L&N GP7s that were extensively rebuilt with a chop job on the short hood, and a single GP9 from the Algoma Central. None of those went into service until they had been reworked by Waterville.
  25. Since my eyesight isn't good enough to determine whether or not both engines have the crew needed to work in tandem, I am left with the deliberate error being the stack on the 1500. It did eventually get a water-cooled turbocharger but not until around 1970, at which point it also received the blue dip paint job. There's a picture of the 1500 here http://http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=18441 in the original paint scheme in (according to the caption) 1969 still with the lengthwise stack, this picture http://http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2560062 shows it in blue with a crosswise stack and thus presumably a switch to the water-cooled turbocharger. It looks like it never got m.u. equipment. All of which having been said, I really don't care because as Mike and Nick have said, it's a good picture of some fine modeling. There are some interesting notes on B&M diesels at http://http://www.faracresfarm.com/jbvb/rr/bmrr/dieselde.html#RS2 It includes some notes on the minutia of m.u. equipment and what could run with what in multiple.
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