Scattered Thoughts . . .

M y large scale 4-6-0 steam locomotive has been disassembled into numerous piles of parts for more than a week, I think...  maybe it has been two weeks at this point.  I've completely lost track of time.  Today was the first day that provided the opportunity to assemble some of these parts again so I could see how things are coming along after repainting most parts and adding some detail parts.  The paint is dry enough now to assemble and disassemble the locomotive as necessary without the risk of ruining the paint job. In this first image, at right, there are some changes here other than the major change in color.  I've added marker lights to the front end of the locomotive (on each side of the headlight) and, for me, this is a big change to the appearance of the locomotive which will be even more noticeable when they are illuminated.  I've also replaced the standard tall cow catcher with a large timber bumper which, in my opinion, not only looks better but it's more a

I 've spent the past few days adding more coats of paint to my locomotive project.  This is a large scale steam locomotive so it is a very large model and it is requiring a lot more paint than I expected.  I've been delayed while waiting on paint to arrive (the USPS is dog-slow lately).  Regardless of a few little problems, this project is slowly coming along. A couple of days ago, I painted everything using Krylon Anvil Gray.  I was hoping for a charcoal neutral color but this Anvil Gray turned out to be more closely resembling something I would call Midnight Blue.  Midnight Blue was definitely not in my plan for this project so I had to order a different color (and wait a bit longer for it to finally arrive).  I couldn't find a gray tone that I liked because they were all too light in tone so I settled for a flat black.  I plan to weather this locomotive so starting with a neutral black will work even though my preference was for a neutral dark gray/charcoal.  I was just

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, whenever I see the need for an emergency repair suddenl

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 mounted up higher on the sides of the to