Scattered Thoughts . . .

I put together a few comparison "before and after" photos of my large scale trolley and my large scale steam locomotive.  I've been wanting to do this for awhile but never got around to it.  Having just working on the trolley again, I figured it was a good time to capture some "after" photos and then compose "before and after" comparisons. In each comparison photo, the top photo is the train in its stock condition from the factory before I did any work on it while the bottom photo shows the same train after I rebuilt it, repainted it and added details. So, this first comparison photo below is of the trolley.  I purchased the trolley a little over a year ago and immediately started planning for an upgrade and rebuild.  It was not running well when it arrived at my door because the motor had a split gear.  I immediately replaced the motor with Bachmann's replacement drive but, disappointingly and unexpectedly, the brand new assembly still ran quite ...

M ore than a week ago, I decided to put together some photos and a video that more closely show the vast upgrades I accomplished on my large scale steam locomotive.  Since I was so busy getting ready for a barbeque with the grandchidren, I completely forgot about all these photos as well as the video until I was showing Sheila a photo of something our grandson, Lukey, noticed about one of my gondolas that I had never noticed.  He noticed that it is a model of a gondola meant specifically to carry gold from mines.  I had no idea but it makes sense since these old ten-wheelers were among the first locomotives sent out to the wild west.   Since I never really finished showing better photos of these upgrades, I guess I'll try to get this blog entry completed before heading to bed tonight. _______________________________________________________ First, let me preface this with a quick update on my health since things weren't so great today.   Quite simply, t...

T he first thing I did this morning was to install the charging jack into the tender.  The glue holding the mounting plate in place had dried overnight so it was secure enough to drill the hole and install the jack.  That was a quick and easy job this morning! This charging jack is located underneath the water hatch of the tender which allows me easy access to recharging the battery which will power the locomotive.  The jack has a rubber seal to keep water out of it in case I get caught by a surprise rain shower.  Actually, I'm a bit surprised that the rubber seal fits in this very small space.  It fits so I'm leaving it in place.   I still have not soldered any wires nor installed the DCC circuit board but the tender is now ready to be wired.  

I t stopped raining long enough today to paint (primer only) all the locomotive parts.  It was still overcast most of the day but the radar was not showing any rain so today was the day to start painting all the locomotive parts.  I set up a couple of saw horses with an old piece of plywood as a makeshift table and then placed all the parts on the plywood.   I just barely covered everything with a nice coat of primer before the can went dry.  Perhaps I should have purchased two cans of primer!  I had only purchased a single can of the charcoal black paint too so now I know one can won't be enough especially since I'll be painting multiple coats of the charcoal.   All the parts fit nicely on this piece of plywood... Here are the leading wheels... The cab without the window panes installed... Below is the lower half of the locomotive including the driving wheels.  These wheels no long need to conduct electricity to power the motor because I am ...

I accomplished another small task this morning with my large scale steam locomotive kitbashing project.   I spent about an hour this morning grinding the window panes down to size, however, looking at the photo here, they could still use a bit of finer sandpaper on the edges.  That will take only about five minutes though.  Grinding down the window panes from their large rough sizes to the finished sizes was a little time consuming.  It was easy with my belt sander but it was a bit time consuming.   I also ventured outside into the wet, damp, soaked yard to survey some facia damage I noticed last night while grilling dinner.  The facia along the back section of the house is so rotted out that the gutter is now falling off the house. These little emergency repairs that continually pop up really screw up accomplishing what I had hoped to accomplish.  Our summer season is far too short.  A long rainy spring doesn't help any.  So, whene...

I t is another rainy spring day here so I'm indoors for the day.  I decided to do a little more work on kitbashing this large scale 4-6-0 steam locomotive.   Long ago, I decided that I wanted to add marker lights to the front end of this steam locomotive whenever I got around to repainting and kitbashing it.  Back when this type of locomotive was manufactured for real-life railroads, there was no such thing as marker lights on locomotives.  Instead of lights, these early locomotives used flags.  However, these 10 wheeler locomotives were still in use when marker lights became more common in use rather than flags.   If I remember correctly most of these 4-6-0 steam locomotives added marker lights to the lower part of the front end mounted just above the cow catcher where the flags had been located.  I seem to remember seeing these older locomotives with marker light mounted this way.  However, I've always preferred the marker lights being...

I 've been laying low while I continue to recover from my tick bite.  I'm still fever-free which I think is now the start of the third day of no fever so that is good.  I don't want to overdo it so I've been laying low inside the house.  While I'm laying low indoors,  I decided to start on a long-planned model railroading project. The particular trains I've been working on with this project are my largest trains...  narrow gauge F scale trains that run on G scale track.  These trains are quite large so are best suited for an outdoor garden layout unless you have a basketball court-sized building just sitting around unused.  We don't have that kind of real estate so we'll be setting up a small garden railroad in our backyard. About eight years ago, I found a beat-up freight set with a big 4-6-0 steam locomotive that was reported as "not running" at a small train show.  The guy was asking for $40 for the whole set so I jumped on it.  I figured ...

Bachmann, O scale, narrow gauge, 4-6-0 steam locomotive. I've been trying to get up to speed with Digital Command Control (DCC) for model trains for the past few months. Well... I started trying to educate myself a couple of years ago but have had difficulty grasping how to fully utilize DCC without having a locomotive to program or even a DCC controller. Over the past year or so, I've collected some DCC locomotives and a couple of different control systems. I'm learning more but it is a bit frustrating for a few reasons. First off, if you want to take a fairly easy route, you can just buy a DCC locomotive and use it in its default configuration with just about any DCC controller. This is certainly the easiest and quickest way to get up and running in DCC. That is not me though. I like to perfect things to my own preferences. I'd like to write a blog post about all the difficulties in programming... all the different DCC systems available today... compatibili...