I've been working on the railroad!

 

 

That's me waving my hat at the cameraman!  The SI had cars that looked similar to this one but we can't be choosers in the model railroad world!

 

I've been working on some 6 or 7 SI flatcars and was wondering what I was going to put on them. I looked into my junk box and lo and behold there are a set of Athearn diesel trucks from the good old days of rubber band drive. The larger axles that handle the rubber bands look something like traction motors so I set them up as a load with oversized chain to hold them down ( plus glue ).

 

Then I found a pair of brass passenger car trucks and they got the same treatment. The boxes are commercial stuff from a friend of mine called Mike O'Connell who owns Chooch Enterprises.

 

This one shows the larger barrel axles from the rubber band drive unit and of course the chain must

have rust as a flavoring.

 

The Si brought cabooses from many sources including this NP brass model.  It was a struggle as to which paint scheme it would wind up in but the SI scheme won!

 

My S&IE electric locos wound back near the paint booth and I though how would they look on the pier and I think they look good. They needs more work and a DCC chip in each as well.

 

I'm doing some work for Jim Bowden on his latest project which is a 2-8-2 steamer for the Alaska Railroad but there are no decals available for them. So that means I had to "stack" the individual letters and......GET THEM STRAIGHT!!!  How did I do for an old guy? One more side to go!

 

Waiting in the wings is my Great Northern electric that worked the hills between Wenatchee and Skykomish, Washington in the Cascade mountains back in the days of electric operations until 1956.

Did you ever get to ride in a dome car?

When we were younger and traveled on the NP's North Coast Limited we stopped at Livingston, Montana on our honeymoon in 1963. here they washed the windows of the dome cars so we would have no obstruction to seeing the magnificent Rocky Mountains we will soon be in..

 

This NCL has 4 dome cars and a boat tail observation heading west according to the shadows on the car.

 

Talk about a view! In any other car you would see very little of this looking straight out the car side

windows. This is the so called "John Allen" bridge as the scenery was spectacular as we head down

the hill approaching a little town called "Butte" Montana. The butt of many jokes. Many of these rocks

looked like black eggs sunk into the land, something a deranged modeler would do on his layout.

 

As you approached the dome from inside the car you would see stairs leading up to the chairs. This was taken in Spokane

where 5 or 6 NP cars are preserved by Mike Gilhouse.

 

The NP monad is the symbol of Ying and Yang, or good and bad, hot or cold, etc. NP wanted to be the connection with the United States and the Orient.

 

As a railfan and modeler the dome also gave you the opportunity to shoot passing trains. This one is an NP freight train as their engines in freight service were black, yellow and red.

Heater cars

Heater cars were used when it got very cold and passenger car needs could not be met by the locomotive itself or they only had freight units that did not have steam heat capabilities for the passenger cars.

 

Here are 2 views of what I was able to find in my collections and as you can see they are both different. Hornby has come out with GN, NP and SP&S heater cars but they may look different that the real ones. I suspect they were all cobbled together by the shop forces on what was available to them at the time.

Not all Chiefs are the same!

That's the Santa Fe Chiefs and their Warbonnet head dress that made them so famous and popular, especially by Lionel in the late 40's  on the EMD F units.

 

This one does not do the Warbonnet justice with the square face on the motor car.

 

This one is my favorite because the Alco PA's are my favorite locomotive and the Warbonnet looks fabulous!

 

Modern EMD F45's did the design fairly well and rekindled the love of this famous icon.

 

Warbonnets came in corrigated  aluminum or stainless steel but something is lost in the translation.

 

Santa Fe made a feeble attempt when they made some F units in yellow instead. Why, when they had

the formula?

 

Back in the late 80's Santa Fe and Southern Pacific were flirting with merger but it never came. They tried to do a simplified Warbonnet  with SF in position so when the merger came all they needed to do was to add SP in front of SF for SPSF railroad.  Clever, or so they thought! Now they have a railroad called BNSF.

Why I take train photos.

Burt Whitney should recognize this place...it's called Cul d'Sac, Idaho and Burt was born in this little town some 70 years ago. This photo was taken in 1979 when they were shooting the movie Breakheart Pass.

 

The diesel was let go and the steam engine does some background action footage for the movie that starred Charles Bronson. The hilo is shooting the film for the movie. This is a 300 mm shot! The bridge is called Half Moon Bridge. I wonder if Burt had a say about that?

 

The date is November 5th, 1974 and the 8444 is leaving Spokane and Expo 74 after a 6 month stay. The loco is owned by the Union Pacific, it is going over I-90 and the bridge is owned now by the BNSF Railroad. It soon will be on the old SP&S right of way towards Marshall and Cheney, Washington.

 

Oh, good old 3206. The Inland Empire Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society  is moving the park engine from High Bridge Park ( I wonder why they called it that? ) to the Spokane County Fairgrounds where it remains today. That is Bruce Butler by the stop sign. I helped raise the money to move it!

 

The SP&S #700 is alive! After 50 some years of being a park engine in Portland, Oregon this passenger engine is on the run again! It is at Hope, Idaho and has a Montana Rail Link F45 as backup power in case the engine had troubles, but it didn't need any help this fine day.

 

Another live steam engine owned by Portland, Oregon is the Southern Pacific 4-8-4 Daylight. It is on one of its many trips up the Columbia River and it passes through numerous Basalt formations along the way on the north side of the river. This is in a remote spot so no one of interest is going to find us.

 

I showed this one before and I am still in awe of the scene. The 8444 Union Pacific loco is on its way to Spokane for Expo '74 and the bridge and the scenery dwarf the train set. The big question to me is the bridge getting a black paint job or a white one?  By now maybe they painted it another color?

 

 

 

 

The NP Club

Just by chance the Northern Pacific Railroad was featured at the club today. Marvin Sheppard brought in his new NP GP9s and had them running around like they owned the place. I had my F7s there as well and Marv asked me to run with him.

 

That gave me the idea to make a theme out of it like we've done with the Milwaukee Road and the Great Northern and the SP&S. All of them had sound and we ran pretty good.

 

At one time I hooked up an elderly RS1 just for the fun of it  and an Spokane International train showed up to ruin the scene!

 

Scotty was under the layout today hooking up port switches and maybe a signal crossing as well.

 

Marv's GP9's as so new they still have shiny brass window shades on the locos. We can fix that on Thursday!

 

F units bring back some good memories of train chasing in and around Spokane as we were the bastion of aging F units for the BN.

Looking back in time

We were talking the other day at the club when Jim Bowden asked if I had photos of the Northern Pacific roundhouse at Parkwater yard in Spokane. Yes I do but the SP&S FA diesels got in the way on the turntable. When I got to Spokane in 1967 the roundhouse held the NP 0-4-0 Minnetonka and the NP 4-4-0 #684. Burlington Northern gave them away in 1978 to Duluth. MN and North Dakota. They didn't stay in Spokane as we didn't get into the Fairgrounds until 1979 with the UP 4-6-2 #3206.

 

Real railroads and fake ones!

I had a doctor's appointment on Monday and being I got there early I wandered over to 9th Avenue overlooking the famous Latah Bridge in West Spokane.  I knew a train was due as I saw it moving fast through the Spokane Valley on the way to downtown and I caught it in good light.

 

Pulling back from the 200 mm lens into my 22 mm wide angle a took a wide shot of it as well. I remembered that Phil Hastings had taken a photo of Northern Pacific trains here back in the 50's so I looked for it in my photo collection.

 

The trees have certainly grown up a lot but you can still see Sunset Bridge is now blocked by I-90 and Latah bridge as well. In the background of Phil's old photo...you can see UP High Bridge and beyond that would be GN's Fort Wright bridge. Lots has changed, some good, some bad.

 

And now for the real trains that don't bite back! Jim Bowden had 2 UP Tunnel Motors riding the rails on the Evergreen tonight.

 

In the good old days all respectable trains had cabooses and so did Jim's!

 

Here's a detour train or one of UP's many trains through Spokane that has Canadian Pacific power on the point. It is pulling....a....coal....train!!!! it must be the end of the earth! I am slowly covering the ground at the port district so now I can position a grain car in the foreground and it looks right.

 

Spike Gorley's CP power set has sound and boy are they sweet runners.  Once you have a sounded loco you'll never want to go back to silence.

Random thoughts

Several of our members at the club model the Kansas City Southern and I have noticed more and more KCS units passing through Spokane as borrowed power as BNSF must be power short with so many coal, oil and gain trains heading west.

 

Being our club is called Evergreen I thought that I would add RAILROAD MODELERS to a model of one of these intermodal boxes that I see most every day. They come in 40 and 20 foot packages.

 

I saw another one of those airplane trains the other day with 5 or 6 of them heading west to Everett, Washington where they put them all together for Boeing.  That green paint is most striking.

 

Last month I visited the Trentwood Bridge on the Union Pacific and I shot this photo of these very large donuts that I believe come from a mill in the area that ground down grain into flour and here they lay on the Centennial bike and hike trail. Now they are seats.

Anyone interested in a piece of plastic that is about 26 inches tall by 7 foot wide? This is what we used to make water on the Evergreen pier and it worked very well. Bids anyone? See below.

 

It has a nice water look to it and we colorized the bottom and left the top transparent.

 

Moving chemicals and coal.

Tommy frank almost has a unit train going with his purchase of these white covered hoppers getting pulled by two BNSF GE units.

I was setting up 2 of the guys with a photo op and I noticed both sets where orange themed then what else is going on Don Carniegie is running past with another color scheme of orange of the Milwaukee Road. Unless BNSF does a heritage unit in GN colors they will never pass each other on the rails in real life. Maybe that's why we model stuff so it can happen.

 

Here is the same view looking the other way at Beaver Canyon, Don had a unit train as well in the form of a Milwaukee Road coal train of 34? cars. I ask the guys to stop their trains so the models don't blur as the camera is shooting with available light at 15th or 30th of a second.

 

The power set consisted of 3 SD-40-2 EMDs .

 

A new Milwaukee Road 60 foot boxcar awaits for loading of lumber at our lumber mill. Does that deck look too clean?