BCW (1959) fleet takes shape

It was just coincidence that Trainorama announced the imminent arrival of a ready-to-run model of the NSWGR 1971-version BCW cattle wagon the same time I finally got around to building the Minimodels version of the 1959 wagons.

I ended up with seven of these kits through ebay and trades. They mostly sat unbuilt in the "to-do" box, their spot on the workbench delayed until such time that I decided to scratchbuild a new underframe for the cars. Thankfully, a resin casting from IDR became available, making it much easier to correctly model the low slung appearance of these wagons.

I'm guessing I'll need 12-15 BCW's for Narrabri North. The working timetable for the main north shows a Monday-Saturday Stock & Goods train from Moree, stopping each evening but Tuesday to pick up cars from Narrabri's saleyards for movement to market in Sydney. The branchline trains from Pokatatroo and Walgett are also scheduled to connect with these high-priority trains, so in the operating scheme of things it's important to have enough rolling stock to protect these assignments.


I followed much of Stephen Ottaway's article on modifying the Minimodels BCW that appeared in issue 9 of Australian Journal of Railway Modelling, with a few important short-cuts--Stephen's models are truly outstanding, but I had seven of these to build. The first major shortcut was the use of the IDR underframe. Stephen also used his skill in working with brass to fabricate outside braces and turnbuckles for the carbody using brass strip and brass wire. I instead used styrene in lieu of brass. Thirdly, Stephen used thin strips of copier paper glued and lightly sanded atop a new styrene roof to simulate aged Malthoid (tarpaper) roofing; I simulated this with paint instead.





The IDR underframes were a Godsend, but not without a couple of caveats. Apparently, these were intended to use with a pair of Casula CW carbodies combined to create the taller 1974 version of the BCW. The Minimodels carbodies of the 1959 cars are approximately 6" too wide. One could deal with this two ways: narrow the ends of Minimodels cars accordingly, or laminate thin styrene strips to the solebars of the IDR casting, adding "U" channel supports for the carbody to rest on. I did both, and visually, you can't really tell the difference.

Above the solebars, very little of these cars is metal, the wood weathering in the sun a lighter shade than the original gunmetal grey. I mixed a little Floquil "Weathered Black" in with Floquil "Primer" to simulate the faded paint, going back later with mostly primer paint "stippled" onto the carsides for further depth. The metal braces were dry-brushed with a rusty color (in this case, Tamiya XF-52 "Flat Earth"). The Malthoid on the roof was simulated with Polly-S "Engine Black", which looks fine when toned down with dullcoat.

So, with seven 1959 BCW, I'm now waiting for one or two four-packs of the 1971 BCW's from Train-O. I'd like to add a few kitbashed 1974 cars in PTC blue, also, built up from still more IDR underframes and Casula CW's.

I'm just about ready for train #694, the up stock train from Moree, to make its pick-up at Narrabri!



. . .and one MLV. . . .



Purchased an AR Kits MLV kit to join the already-assembled IDR version and the still-under-construction Minimodels aluminum MLV (another Minimodels offering requiring a modified or replacement underframe!). It only got a little more detailing than the basic kit: lamp brackets, side hand-railings, and a bit more underframe brake detailing. But it builds into a nice-looking kit despite its age and will look right at home on the head-end of the North-West Mail.

Newcastle Flyer!

Here's a gem a friend stateside alerted me to. Enjoy!

In the meantime, the BCW project nears completion. Photos soon.

Railways at Work

Here's a cool little vintage movie 1964 John Gillies tipped me off to. Reminds me of something I'd have watched while a schoolboy! So, while I'm cleaning off the workbench to get back finishing a small fleet of BCW, enjoy railways in the golden age!

Another One Bites the Dust!

Union Pacific's Moscow Local switches the seed warehouses on Harry Bilger's Moscow UP/NP layout.


What is it with the layouts coming down? Seems I know of more being dismantled than abuildin' these days. . . while Dallas/Fort Worth was never a bit hotbed of prototype-based operating layouts, we're losing another great one with the imminent demise of Harry Bilger's very cool railway depicting the small town of Moscow, Idaho circa 1965.

You might remember this one from the 2009 Model Railroad Planning magazine. Harry, who grew up near the Red River in Sherman, Texas, memorialized the northern Idaho farm/college town of Moscow in an 11 X 22' layout in a separate building outside his Whitesboro, Texas home. Harry's been retired a few years, and he's making the wise choice to sell his home and nice wooded property and move with his wife into a senior's townhome down the road in Denton. Better to make the move now, while they still have their health, than when it becomes a real issue.

Harry made a career on the Milwaukee Road railroad in Chicago, but he chose not to model this great railroad, nor his childhood Texas lines, but Moscow, where he spent less than two years while attending University of Idaho. But what a railroad town! Moscow was served by branchlines of three railroads of the northwest, Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, and Great Northern. Harry's layout features the first two; his next, somewhat smaller layout in the new townhome will depict the GN in Moscow.

UP and NP shared a narrow corridor though Moscow, lined with grain elevators, seed warehouses, lumber yards, cement distributors and oil jobbers. It's a great prototype to model--relatively compact, with interesting operations. UP had a local originate here on a turn to Colfax, Washington; NP served Moscow with an out and back local from Pullman and two through freights and an RDC passenger train in each direction also ran thru each day.

I had a second opportunity to operate the layout last week, and it ran flawlessly. Harry's scratchbuilt structure are among the stars of the layout, and he's as interested in digging up a new fact or photo as he is adding another accurate boxcar to the railroad. There's nothing flashy on the railroad in Moscow--it's same old same old GP9's for power, and boxcars, flat cars, tank cars, and cement hoppers between that and the steel cabooses.

For my Aussie modeling friends, the lesson I take away from this American-based railway is this: Harry's layout is another argument for the notion that modeling the "ordinary" often results something that definitely is NOT boring.

It's a shame it's coming down in a few weeks, but I'm sure his next Moscow creation will be just as evocative. And I'll be 30 miles closer to his new place, so I hope to be a frequent visitor!

There's a few more photo's of Harry's layout here.



"back side" of the layout, featuring visible staging and NP's long cement/oil spur track.


Overview of Moscow, NP in the foreground, UP towards the back. The majority of structures are scratchbuilt to match their prototype.


Atmospheric scene of Moscow.


Looking across the NP yard toward the Union Pacific depot.

Alcos in the mail--and they aren't 48 class.

Modeling NSW doesn't mean I don't have other modeling interests. I'll collect a few locomotives or freight cars of US railroads that might have sentimental or special interests. There's a small fleet of Milwaukee Road boxcars and grain hoppers and a nice Walthers rib side caboose in the closet. I've got a sweet Burlington Northern F45 from Athearn as a memento of seeing these giants in the Pacific Northwest. And I've kept a nice handful of rolling stock and the locomotives used on my Walla Walla Valley layout before my NWSGR modeling adventure: the two HH660 Alcos kit-bashed using Lifelike Alco S-series underframe and cab and a resin long hood--definitely custom, and I'm sure the only HO models out there when built painted for Walla Walla Valley!

That isn't the case anymore, since Atlas just released their own HH660 in WWV paint. Walla Walla Valley modeling has gone main-stream! Factory-equipped with an accurate McIntosh/Seymour 538 straight-six turbocharged sound decoder, how could I resist? The detail and running-qualities are better than my kit-bashed version, and the price was right.

They arrived today, only a few months after the order window closed. And I paid nearly $100 apiece under retail for them--under $180 each. And that's with sound. And I didn't have to pay in advance. Eat your heart out.

Times like these, waiting three years now for a trio of paid-for 48 Class Alcos to show up (late this year? In 2012?) makes me realize how tough you Aussie modelers have it. Small production runs=high prices. Small production runs+few retailers=no discounts. Small production runs=wait at the back of the line for the American manufacturers to finish their Chinese factory runs, then you'll have your turn. Okay, I share your pain. And I've got postage to pay as well.

So when I read whinging Yank modelers on internet discussion boards complaining that Athearn has fallen three months behind on their delivery schedule, how dare those bastards!, I really have to bite my tongue. You have no idea how good you've got it.

Waiting for the Mails.. .

Oooh! Should be an exciting couple of weeks by the postal box.

• Ordered a new Canon 60D body,which should be here by week's end. Will sell the Rebel XTi, still in great condition. Gotta get ready for Oz 2012, ya know. . .
  
• New screen for the netbook. It sorta cracked getting jammed in the overhead bin coming back from Arizona in March;
• AR Kits correcting my order for some freight bogies, and adding a few more to boot;
• Mess o'fun stuff from IDR: some new underframes for BCW as well as a couple wagons Lance Lassen wanted to include on my order also;
• And, finally, a set of Austrains FS/BS. . .and thanks to Eva Wong at Tom's Hobbies for being quick on the mark to send them to me so quickly after a month of inquires to Austrains were either gobbled up by the internets or not yet responded to. Once more, Eva and Tom's come through with exemplary customer service.

Now, I only have to find some time to put this stuff to use!



Lookin' fine for a 53-year-old!

This Budd's for ME!

Speaking of cameras and Australian trains. . .I managed to get out for an afternoon trackside to photograph a new commuter rail operation about 30 minutes north of my house, connecting the mid-sized city of Denton to a light-rail route into downtown Dallas. Eventually, this new operation, called the "A-Train", will be rostered with new, ugly "Diesel Multiple Unit" cars (ugly? Well, I'm just crass enough to say they look like dildos!), but until these are delivered, trains of leased Budd RDC diesel cars are handling the commute.

In the late 1950's it was the "Budd Car" that figured to be the savior of money-losing passenger train operators in the US and Canada. Nearly 400 of the diesel-powered Rail Diesel Cars--in five variations, including an unpowered trailer--were produced, the majority for eastern US carriers New Haven, Boston & Maine,and Canadian Pacific and Canadian National. Many had long careers as commuter carriers; some on medium-haul intercity services replacing more costly to operate locomotive-hauled trains. At one point, New York Central--I shit you not--strapped a pair of surplus turbo jet engines to one in order to set a world's rail speed record. By the 1970s, though, most US operators had retired their fleets, although they proved popular in Canada for nearly two more decades.

Where's the Australian connection? Budd built three for Commonwealth Railways in Australia; some look-alikes were also built down undah for NSWGR.

The cars operating on the "A-Train" --10 cars, in five, two-car sets--are all former CN and CPR cars leased from another North Texas commuter hauler, Trinity Rail Express. TRE has surplused them since acquiring a fleet of locomotives and cars based upon (and in some cases acquired from) GO Transit in Toronto. The "A-Train," then, has become the largest RDC-only passenger operation in the world. Quite a testimony to the self-contained, self-propelled passenger cars, the youngest of which are over 53 years old!

I won't walk across the street to photograph most of what passes for US railroading these days--but those Budds in Denton? Oh yeah.


Equally at home from Canadian forests to South Australian bush to the suburbs of Dallas. . .

Old-school modeling! It's in the can!

Sure, the K wagon is $20--but three of these, along with the colorful Kodak film can--make a pretty spiffy oil tanker for less than $99 a three pack! And: bonus! It matches the diecast truck!

Sometimes I think we modelers today have it too easy. There's paint that's mixed to perfection for virtually whatever color your railway used. Detail parts a'plenty. And that fine ready-to-run equipment? It's so good, anymore, that it truly invites the winghers to take broadsides at even the finest efforts, nit-picking, I suppose, for the sake of nit-picking (and let's face it--the Internets give us each a place to be experts).

Something, perhaps, is lost from the old days of modeling. Remember? Well, it was before my time, but I've heard that folks used to whittle locomotives out of left-over pieces of firewood, make turntable pits out of old hubcaps fromVolkswagens, and laid track using old clothespins and stolen chrome trim strip from Chevrolets.

So I'd a bit heartened to see this revival of the resourceful modeler in recent popular modling magazines. In keeping with the reduce-reuse-recycle ethos of the Green Movement, modelers today are using everything they can from the rubbish bin to enhance their modeling. Plastic caps for paint cans? Sure! Bridge abutments! I have a friend who uses his wife's tampon applicators as pipe loads on flat cars (though make sure you ask her at the right time of the month to use them).

I'm inspired, most of all, by the growing movement to feature old film canisters. What could be more old-school than that? It's using remnants of a bygone technology! It's environmental sound! And what nostalgia! I used to have literally dozens of plastic Kodak film canisters rolling around in my car--I couldn't get rid of them fast enough. A few, of course, were kept for storing loose nuts, screws, Kadee couplers and, back in the freewheeling 80s, a bit of herbal relaxation (which could, in a pinch,be used as realistic ground cover, as long as you got rid of the seeds).

Imagine my amazement when I discovered a few of my dad's old Kodachrome canisters from the 1950s--even better than the two-tone grey plastic version, these were in bright Kodak orange and red--what a shame not to use them! And given the recent discussion about the accuracy of the new Austrains four-wheel tank wagons, why not put one to use atop a very nice IDR casting K wagon. The color scheme? Well, I'm sure it's a "what if?", but It almost could pass for Golden Fleece!!

What resourcefulness have you employed lately on your model railway?