Way too long since the last update!
In mid-January I bought a Proto 2000 SD9 diesel off ebay. I ordered a TCS non-sound decoder with a Keep Alive. It showed up late in the month, and on January 28th I began work on the locomotive.
Because the keep alive capacitors are a bit bulky, I would have to remove a bit of the front weight over the front truck worm. The cut line is marked out with a blue felt tip marker:
I removed the weight from the frame and mounted it in my small vise. In this shot you can see the grove where I've started cutting the weight with a hacksaw.
I didn't just stick in a decoder and call it good. I also inspected the entire drive system for cracked gears. Fortunately I didn't find any.
I also cleaned out the old oil - the trucks had way too much, and it was all over everything. I cleaned it all out, applied oil to the bearings and just a small amount of teflon-impregnated grease to the gears.
Here's the decoder tucked into the trimmed weight after the loco was completely reassembled (except for the shell of course):
Here's the SD9 ready for service:
While I was working on the SD9 a Proto 2000 SD7 came up on ebay, so I snatched it up. It arrived on the 2nd of February.
About this same time I dug out the gears I'd recently received for the Doodlebug. It was about time to get started repairing that.
On February 6th I began working on the Doodlebug. I replaced the cracked gears on the power axles using my NWSL Wheel Puller to first remove the old gears:
Then I used the puller again to press the new gears onto the shafts.
That seemed to go pretty good. I reassembled the bug and test ran it. It ran okay, but the gearbox was screaming like a banshee! I had to take the entire thing apart again and do what I should have the first time - disassemble the entire power truck, clean and re-lubricate it.
When I took it apart I found the housing filled with half-petrified grease. This is one side - the other side was even more packed. Why do manufacturers do this? I'm surprised the thing would run at all!
I cleaned everything up, then reassembled the Doodlebug yet again. Here the gears are reinstalled in one of the housing halves. After I took this shot I applied a bit of grease to the gear teeth, and oil to the gear and worm shafts.
At the same time I was working on the Doodlebug I also began addressing a spot in the track near Casper where the 2-10-2 Santa Fe's front drivers always derailed. Everything else ran through fine, but the long wheelbase of the 2-10-2's had a problem.
The derailments occurred a couple inches to the right of the points in this shot. This is the switch off the mainline at the west end of Casper, near the engine terminal.
After several hours of detective work I figured out what the problem was. The fix was simple - I put a .010 styrene shim under the outside rail to reduce a small sag in the rail.
Now everything runs through here fine. I'll leave it like this for a couple of operating sessions, and if the problem remains fixed I'll trim the shim at the tie ends and re-ballast this spot.
At this point I spent a couple days getting the SD7 ready to go. I went through the same steps I did with the SD9 - trim the front weight, inspect and re-lube the drive mechanism, and install the decoder. A test run showed that it ran well.
Then I decided it was time for a change of pace, and I spent a few days getting three cars onto the layout. The first was this GN Stockcar, which I picked up at a train show awhile back. It was all assembled, so all I had to do was change out the trucks and weather it:
I also assembled two of these Proto 2000 Conoco tank cars. These are pretty detailed, with a lot of small parts to be added to the tank and frame. They come out looking pretty nice. They take four to five hours each to complete, including weathering:
Later in February I spent half an hour or so getting ready to rework the area between the mainline and the siding at Powder River. My first effort there left something to be desired, and the "finished" layer was peeling up off the base layers as well. I scraped the area to break up the loose plasterwork. You can see in this photo how little was actually stuck down:
I vacuumed up the mess and left it at that.
Almost all the Burlington SD7's and 9's had steam generators, and the Proto 2000 models come with separate details that can be applied if the modeler wishes. I wished for the SD9, so on the 23rd I added the generator stack and vent details to the short hood, along with a bit of wire to represent one of the small pipes. Here's the result:
I might do the SD7 also in the future.
On the 23rd I received a mini drill press I'd ordered off Amazon. I sure could have used this when I was adding stirrup steps to all those hoppers a few weeks ago!
I spent the rest of February installing the spur for Crown Cork & Seal in Worland. First I had to add the new plywood base:
Because this extends out over the helix (and the access hole in the benchwork framing) it took a lot of structure to support this three-square-foot piece of benchwork:
Once I had the cork sheet down on the new plywood I laid out the siding. I didn't like how it looked and decided to add just a bit more plywood to adjust the routing a bit:
That was better - more curve to the siding. Once I had the cork down and the siding laid it looks like this:
Those curves are 18 inch radius. Locomotives used on the local that service this spur won't handle those curves, so the engineer will have to use other cars in his train as a handle to pick up and spot cars at the facility.
I did this because for some reason that more or less how the real spur in Worland snakes around through very sharp curves. The orientation of the spur is a bit different, but the character is there:
The early part of March I spent mostly building four more of the Proto 2000 tank cars. Here's one of them:
We left off with the ballasting being finished for now. When more scenery is complete I'll do more.
Just after my last update I replaced that trainset power pack I mentioned with this MRC Railpower 2400. It will certainly be able to drive those IRDOTs in the staging yard!
In mid-November I bought a brass Burlington M2A class 2-10-2 (a "Santa Fe") off ebay. It showed up right after Thanksgiving:
It will be a lot of work to convert to DCC and tune up, but once it's running well I'll give it to a friend to paint and weather. It will make a nice addition to the roster, and should be able to handle those long reefer trains coming up the helix from east staging to Casper.
In early December I began working on Powell again. On the 1st I added some of the mainline roadbed in town.
I also finished, for now, the subroadbed installation heading west of town:
To push on towards Cody I'll need to add benchwork underneath the Thermopolis peninsula to the left.
By December 4th I had all the mainline subroadbed installed at Powell...
...And by the 6th I had the mainline laid all the way through town and heading out to the west (left in this shot):
I was ready to start laying the sidings in Powell, but I discovered I only had one piece of code 55 track left. I checked online and found that Iron Planet Hobbies had it in stock, and at a good price, too. I ordered two bundles, or 12 sticks.
At this point I spent the next few days removing the cab lettering and road number from a Proto 2000 2-10-2 I got from a friend in Sheridan, WY. The loco was numbered 6302, which I already had one of. I needed to give it a new number.
I began using my usual method to remove lettering, and quickly discovered that the Proto 2000 lettering is much more stubborn than it is on either BLI or Spectrum locomotives. After about an hour of work, which would be a completely cleaned loco on either BLI or Spectrum, I was only at this point:
About another 45 minutes of work netted a completely cleaned-off number, but some of the paint had also come off right down to the plastic body. That's the green streaks you can see in this photo.
This wasn't a major problem - I simply repainted the panel (on both sides of the cab) with Vallejo black, then applied the decals.
Turns out while I was in New Jersey I caught Covid, which put me in bed for a couple days beginning Christmas day. It wasn't real bad, and by December 27th I felt good enough to go down to the train room and open the pack of track I'd received from Iron Planet. Gave me a pretty good surprise, too - they'd mistakenly sent me N scale track instead of HO!
A phone call resolved that. I put the track back into the mailing tube and prepared to return it. I had to wait until the 2nd of January because I needed to stay away from folks until I was no longer contagious with the Covid. Five days is recommended after symptoms abate.
I felt okay though, so I finished up the 2-10-2 by applying flat finish over the decals to protect them. I did that on the 27th, then on the 28th I lubed and tuned the mechanism and reprogrammed the decoder. It's now number 6309, seen here sitting in Casper and awaiting its first assignment.
I finished out 2024 by adding ties blocks under most of the turnouts in Powell. I'm out of them now, so I'll have to print more.
On January 3rd I turned to making some adjustments on the swing gate. It's been pretty trouble free since I built it about 18 months ago, but there has been some minor shrinkage of the benchwork and frame, which resulted in the rail gaps on the hinge end of the door closing up (and gaps at the free end widening):
Once I shimmed the gate framework a bit the gaps were better:
Just yesterday I had to go back and make some more adjustments. We'll see how everything is in a few months when the weather warms back up and the humidity rises a bit (it's extremely dry right now, even with a humidifier running).
On the 6th I finally got to work on those hopper cars that were busted up in shipping. First order of business was to repair the broken stirrup steps. I drilled small holes in the corner of the cars:
Then I added A Line stirrup steps. I already have this series of cars on the layout, so I needed to renumber these new ones. Along with the stirrup step you can see where I tried to remove part of the car number. Didn't work out so well.
I tried several different methods for removing the numbers, but all of them affected the underlying paint as well. After I wound up with this on one car, I gave up and went to the Accurail renumber decals.
These hoppers predate Accurail's renumbering decals program, but I discovered that the decals for their CNW series of hoppers is a close match to the body color and number style. I was fortunate to have a set of those decals on hand, so I began applying them. Here's one renumbered car:
By the 18th of January I had five of the seven cars completed (including weathering) and sitting on the track at Worland. Not perfect, but not bad either:
Meanwhile I received the replacement track from Iron Planet Hobbies on the 15th. I was a bit concerned when I received the package - the end wasn't properly set in place. It was just taped onto the end of the tube:
When I extracted the track it was all scrunched from being stuffed into a tube that was a bit too short! It actually looks worse in person than it does in this photo:
I checked each piece of track carefully for damage, and found that on about half the pieces one rail was bent about half an inch from the end:
There's also one piece with a rail slightly kinked vertically in the middle. I'll have to be careful to use that section for fill pieces where I can just discard the kinked bit. Beyond that, snipping off the bent rail isn't a problem. The track is probably over 95 percent useable, so I kept it. Still, Iron Planet Hobbies will be my "last resort" shop in the future.
With the track now on hand, plus a couple pieces I got from Dave in Basin, I took to installing the sidings in Powell. In this shot I've tick-marked the layout of the masking tape ramp I use to lower the sidings down a bit off the mainline.
After a few days' work, all the Powell sidings are now in place and wired. Yesterday I ran a Mikado through them to test the track. Everything seems to be working.
