barkingdigger

That looks great! Could you solve the end curves with a bit of lateral thinking? Maybe making the letter board part of the roof, with a corresponding rebate in the top of the car side for it to fit into?

Have you checked the Walthers catalogue to see if anyone already makes drop-in replacements for your locos? Failing that, have you tried contacting DCC Concepts with your requirements? They may have the info you need...

As a fellow fan of PRR stock (Long Island Rail Road used a bunch!) I'd be tempted to dig a Spectrum coach out of storage and CAD-up a model roof to 3D-print. But it'll take me some time to get round to it, and you'd need access to a decent resin printer because Shapeways would charge several limbs for something this big! (I have a mate who prints for a hobby, and I can usually get him to print things for me if I give him the STL file.) I'd be tempted to print it in sections to fit the print-bed of smaller machines...

The air pipe is the bigger black one directly under the couplers - all US trains use them from end to end.

Single-car trains were not usually a "thing" in the US - short trains were often a loco and single unpowered car outside the big cities of the east coast. There are plenty of self-powered cars, but usually with only one cab so two or more were coupled back-to-back because train lengths were not an issue. Exceptions are the diesel-powered RDC (from the 50s through about 2000 in some places), and many types of electric interurban cars that are essentially trams on steroids. Interurbans are as old as electric traction, but mostly died out in the 70s/80s as cheap cars finally dried up their customer base and clogged the roads they needed to run on. If you need a single double-ended unit pick an RDC - loads of railroads used them to support otherwise-nonviable routes they were forced to keep open...

Not sure about the Atlas N gauge model, but Athearn's HO scale "SW1500" (which was actually a SW7/9/1200 body) had to be made wider to fit the rather large electric motors then in use, and was tapered to meet the cab so the details could be made correct. The same issue afflicted their GP9, GP35, and other early hood units but these had no taper where the over-wide hood met the cab.

You have to wonder if we're doing a disservice to the gene pool by saving these folks from earning the Darwin awards they are so keen to get? Even at my teenage dumbest I'd never have tried to cling to the outside of a train...

None of this is new - as far back as the 1940s Burma Shave warned US drivers: Remember this If you’d Be spared Trains don’t whistle Because they’re scared Sadly it seems the only way to guarantee everyone's safety is to physically separate roads and rails through the use of bridges, underpasses, and overpasses. Growing up on Long Island we had loads of grade crossings (most with lights and barriers) and still had a number of incidents each year. Our trains were mostly fast commuter consists, and the LIRR ran them in push-pull mode to avoid turning the trains at each end of a run. Rather than just fit a control cab on the end of a passenger car in the 1970s they went out and bought old F-units to serve as unpowered cabs just to give the driver some protection. (The empty space inside held a generator set for lights and AC in the cars...) Folks often wondered why a short five-car train needed a loco at each end!

Very nice indeed! What scale are you working in?

Bear in mind the Revell tug is meant to be low-slung to fit under the flaired bows of cargo ships (like real ship-tugs), while a car-float tug usually had a taller bridge tower so the crew could see over the top of the loaded floats. The LIRR used tugs similar in design to the Revell kit, but you need to raise the bridge accordingly. (Got one for a planned float scene that I never managed to build...)

Yep, that's a very good book - I just had a look through my copy! Plenty of early locos shown side-on in posed shots ideal for CAD-reconstruction. Of course if you're designing from "scratch" you ought to do a camel-back...

I'm surprised nobody has raised the failed SP-SF merger yet. After it collapsed folks said the re-lettered SPSF locos stood for "Shouldn't Paint So Fast"...

Sounds like you need a copy of Steel Rails to the Sunrise, by Ron Ziel! The early chapters show loads of wacky loco designs from the 1800s... Sadly there's nothing ready-to-run out there, so you'd have to do a lot of engineering, maybe to fit an existing chassis?

Looks like a thunderstorm brewing - raise the kite, Igor! That's some nifty CAD-work! A tad early for my interests, but still very good to see. What are you planning for locos?

Cute car! It looks to be a Walthers MoW car, on the concept of an old wooden boxcar modified with bay windows for crew accommodation at one end and the other end has supply storage. Maybe to support the Big Hook? But I suspect it was "imagineered" rather than based on a prototype. Should be a fun addition to your pike!

I think those "dimples" represent the bolts and flat ends of the rail, so you need to drill next to them and add wire.

The Long Island Rail Road started doing that back in the '70s. They realised it was cheaper to buy worn-out F and FA cab units to act as reversing control cabs than it was to order specially-built passenger cars with controls, and the added bonus (once the drive train was removed) was space for a diesel generator set to provide lights and heat to the passenger cars! They were retired sometime around 2000 when the new fleet of locos and cars arrived. The old cabs provide much better collision protection for the crew than those push-pull cars.

Model Railroader magazine (or rather its parent company) has published books called Model Railroad Planning pretty much every year, with a mix of layout plans based on what they saw during the year. They are very useful for ideas!

Freight-car loading was based on rules that meant railroads tried to use up any local empty "foreign" cars to send them back home as a priority over using their own cars, so if you have active customers on your layout they may well see a mix of cars from other roads depending on where their products are headed. (That's part of the fun of US modelling!) On the P2K split gears issue, their GPs can use Athearn gears as replacements - these are more robust and not prone to splitting. IIRC the issue was that the P2K gears were a fraction too tight on the metal axles, causing them to split...

Well, yes and no. The metal "knuckle" style of couplers made famous by Kadee are mostly compatible with other knuckle couplers, but even so there can be issues between the newer brands that sprang up when Kadee's patents expired. Several manufacturers such as McHenry offer their own versions, mostly in plastic rather than metal, and these are often found on high-end locos and stock, but I prefer using only Kadees on my stock. Be aware that the standard original Kadees are a tad overscale to make them reliable, and they also offer "scale" ones that are not really compatible with the originals due to their smaller size. There are other styles of unrealistic plastic "toy train" couplers that come with some brands of rolling stock - known as horn-hook - but these look terrible and are not at all compatible with knuckle types so need replaced.

During the C-liner era there were progressive changes to health & safety rules that led to a gradual increase in added handrails etc, and these varied from one road to another both in time and style, so you need to pick a photo to model. (I think they left the factory "smooth" at first, with only the vertical grabs either side of the doors...) If you want a later timeframe then look at the Long Island units, as they lasted about a decade longer than C-liners on the bigger roads - it was a lot to do with maintenance of the complicated O-P engine coupled with the way bigger companies sidelined non-standard equipment as their fleets became dominated by EMD and GE products.

My pick is the Long Island Rail Road, where I grew up. My interest runs from the late 1940s to about 2000 (the classic "diesel era"), and the location gives me free reign to run some locos from PRR and New Haven, as well as oddballs from Precision National, Bangor & Aroostook, and other "visitors". Then there are a few coulda-beens from NYC etc that were too cool (or cheap) to resist! On the fictional list I was a big fan of the Midland Road and Utah Belt - both featuring heavily in the pages of Model Railroader. Then there was the Turtle Creek Central imagineered by the folks at MR with a logo bearing more than passing resemblance to the LIRR's Dashing Dan of the 50s/60s! They made the mistake of including free decal sheets in the mag...

Not sure if this counts as a dead thread yet, but I model the LIRR because I grew up with the Montauk Branch running at the bottom of my back yard! There's a lot of interesting equipment and paint schemes available these days, although I still prefer detailing and painting old locos like the Athearn GP38-2 rather than buying pre-painted...