Freight Car Friday

 Hi folks. Well I thought winter was finished with us here in Nova Scotia for this year. The ground was bare and we have had a couple of days where it was pleasant enough to go for a walk with a lightweight spring jacket - NOT!!. Overnight / today we had approx 20 cm of snow here in my area of the province. On the bright side the temperatures are suppose to go up significantly in the next several days along with rain , so I suspect this snow will not be here for very long. Bring on spring!!. Todays Freight Car Friday spotlights 2 Kadee hopper cars. These cars where bought shortly before I switched over to On30 scale approx 10 years ago. As such , they were never used and are essentially like new. They remained as part of my small HO scale freight car collection when I sold off the vast majority of my HO equipment. I am glad I held onto them. I must admit even with the plethora of new manufacturers high quality RTR cars, these Kadee cars are still very high quality and impressive. The hatches even open on these ones (as shown in the pictures). I plan on picking up a few more in the future. Happy Friday everyone.....

Dont wait....

 Hi folks. Most of us have at some point in the hobby experienced buyers remorse and the opposite which is where we see something we like and wait or put off till tomorrow to buy and then poof -its gone.. Well I don't know about you, but as far as the latter I have experience it many tines. For some time now, I have wanted to purchase an Atlas Classic GP7 in the Bangor and Aroostook scheme. Recently there have been several releases by different manufacturers of Bangor and Aroostook GP7's , but they have all been in the Railroads newer Orange, Blue, and Grey scheme. I wanted the older Dark Blue and Grey scheme which I liked better - looks classy to me. Well to that end, Its been probably approx. 15 years since this was last done by Atlas. I saw one about a year ago that looked in "as new condition" but I hesitated  and then you know what happened - poof! So for the last year or so, I have been keeping my eyes open on eBay, and various on line second hand dealers. About 2 weeks ago , late one evening I was on the following site:

Model Train Market | Buy Model Trains Online - Railroad Accessories and Train Stuff

 and there was not one , but 4 listed. 2 were the older Atlas/ Kato variety , 1 was an Atlas classic that had a dcc (only) decoder in it ( the handrails were broken in the pictures ( I suspect this was done by the previous owner while converting to DCC as the handrails on these are fragile)) and lastly there was an Atlas Classic that was DC only and in the pictures all the handrails were still in tack. I immediately ordered the last one. I did not hesitate and I am glad I did not - I checked back the next day and both the Atlas/Kato ones were gone and a couple days later the one with the broken handrails was no longer there - poof all of them gone!!!. So yesterday the postman arrived and I immediately opened the box and did an inspection - I believe I lucked out in acting as quickly as I did - although the model came with no box (grrrrrr), when inspected there were no broken parts - the end handrails were still in the small factory sealed packet and the wheels looked to have virtually no wear. I think I got the best one of the bunch. I checked it out on a piece of flex track hooked up to my old Tech 2  2400 power pack and it ran flawlessly - yeah!. I swapped out the Accumate couplers for Kadee Scale Head # 158's. The loco will be converted in the future to sound - another sound project for my list.....so moral of the story is don't wait - if you see something appealing so are 100 other modelers.

BAR GP7

BAR GP7

BAR GP7

Another Sound Conversion

 Hi Folks -- So this particular DCC project has taken me awhile to finish. I have 2 Atlas Classic (Maine Central) GP-7s that I bought new when they were first released back around 2004. I converted them to DCC back then using a TCS 2 function decoder. They have always worked very well with excellent slow speed performance. Finally it was time to bring them up to date with sound. I decided to select Soundtraxx Econami decoders and give those a try - they are considerable cheaper than that companies Tsunami 2 decoders so this was appealing to me given the age of these 2 locos. I ordered the decoders back in early December from Yankee Dabbler - a train shop in New Jersey ( I bought some stuff from their booth last year at the Big E show in Springfield, Mass and was impressed with them and have ordered a couple of times from them now) - I highly recommend them. As luck would have it (or otherwise), I ordered when the huge pre Christmas rush was on and from the news reports, the mail systems in both the US and Canada became "grid locked" due to the season and ongoing Covid 19 pandemic. It was not until the middle of January when  I finally got the parcel. In between ordering the decoders and receiving them, I was originally going to use a Soundtraxx Sugar Cube speakers, however I was doing some research and found out about speakers from Scale Sound Systems and decided to order speakers for these two locos from them. There are lots of rave reviews on the web about them. Here is a link to the model of speaker that I ordered:

Atlas Classic GP7/9 | website (scalesoundsystems.com)

So I received these speakers around the middle of February and went to install them. What I found out was that because of the size of them, you have to modify the lighting in the loco - using Surface Mount LED's  because of the stock light pipes. I didn't have any of these LED's on hand , so another mail order was necessary. I received these about a week ago and was finally able to finish up the project. So morla of teh story is its a good thing to have multiple projects in progress, so in the event you get stalled, you can still work on your other projects. Till next time folks....