The Whiskey River Railway

[gbwdude]

Since last time I've reported in, very little has been done. Apart from the usual things that keep me from train time, my truck needed a oil change and coolant flush, I had CQ (charge of quarters in the barracks, for you non-military folk), and we've done some family stuff out in Land Between The Lakes. On another note, I've also ran out of Kadee couplers and usable trucks for rolling stock, as many of the Whiskey River's pieces of rolling stock started off as basket cases and I've done my best to polish the turds. Yesterday I ran out of black paint, which the roofs of boxcars and cabooses and underframes need to be uniform.

I have noticed that Kadee came out with new truck styles, their 580 series of caboose trucks with leaf springs. Come payday I'll be ordering a big ol' box of the fancy whisker couplers, some paint, a package of centering springs for the original style of Kadee's and a pair or three of the leaf sprung style trucks for the cabeese. Right now some of the cabeese are riding on Bettendorf freight car trucks, which is fine and dandy for other modellers, but this is also a test for their possible use as a tender truck. If they look and work rather well, I'll slap a few under a tender with the pickups modified from the Kadee coupler centering springs.

Tyler

[Bill Nelson]

Originally Posted by

I have noticed that Kadee came out with new truck styles, their 580 series of caboose trucks with leaf springs. Come payday I'll be ordering a big ol' box of the fancy whisker couplers, some paint, a package of centering springs for the original style of Kadee's and a pair or three of the leaf sprung style trucks for the cabeese. Right now some of the cabeese are riding on Bettendorf freight car trucks, which is fine and dandy for other modellers, but this is also a test for their possible use as a tender truck. If they look and work rather well, I'll slap a few under a tender with the pickups modified from the Kadee coupler centering springs.[IMG

http://www.kadee.com/html/583.jpg[/IMG]

Tyler

Kadee makes nice looking trucks, but I'm not sure they would be a good bet for tender trucks. for one thing, you have a plastic axle, so you can't run a wiper off the axle for the uninsulated pickup. secondly the wheels are cast in a light metal, possibly aluminum. whatever it is it collects gunk worse than plastic. I have seen gunk build up so deep on the wheel treads that the flanges are reduced to below scale size, and the car would not stay on the track until I chizeled the crud off the face of the wheel.

I have found that in extreme applications, sprung trucks don't work as well as solid ones, unless there is a lot of weight on them. I have replaced all of the KD trucks on my fleet, and almost all of the Central Valley trucks, and have been replacing KD wheelsets in my rolling stock as I find them..


Bill Nelson

[Doctor G]

Hey Tyler

Its those last 45 miles in the Smoky Mountains that proves the mettle of machine and creator. The #37 WRRR box car loaded with goods for the loggers in East Tennessee was up to the test that the twisting climbing rails in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee put before it.

Important material and liquids were needed for the men at Tremont logging camp. Little River Rail Road management felt the interchange car from Wisconsin was up to the task of traversing its very treacherous rails that had claimed many a lesser man and his machines.

#37 reported in and took up position in the mixed train pulled by #2147. It made it through every gauntlet and arrived to the cheers of the men in the forlorn logging camp.

Doc Tom

[gbwdude]

I got a little work in on some of my more unique rolling stock today, that being my pair of AHM double door wood sheathed boxcars and my tool car X51. I don't have any pics of the tool car at all yet, but to inform you it's just a plain jane Mantua clearance car minus the thing that goes around the body of the car. So far all that's completed to that is I added some underbody details to it, chopped off the horn hooks that mount to the trucks and glued some shims to the bottom of the car floor to mount the couplers when they come in.

The boxcars I do have pics of, and like the tool car, no couplers were mounted due to my dry spell of Kadee products. I bought these cars when I was in Korea from eBay and had them straight home so I never got to inspect them post purchase. These cars have a tab to secure the body to the floor at the end where the couplers will be mounted and had to be modified. I just took my trusty and rusty Xacto to the part of the tab that stuck out and hacked it off. In theory this should work ok, as most of the cars' life will either live on a layout or in a box and shouldn't be moved too much by the 0-5-0 switcher. Naturally also, these cars will be painted and lettered in normal WRRy garb instead of the beautiful paint scheme AHM decided to give them. Prior to paint though, I may go crazy with it and do something similar to this: http://www.trainlife.com/articles/39...g-plastic-cars

I also noticed one thing on both of these cars, check out the slogan... someone in Yugoslavia needs to brush up on their English grammar.

Tyler

[Bill Nelson]

Cleaning off my workbench I came across the Whiskey River Gon Tyler had painted and lettered up for use on The DG CC & W RR. I got couplers, and it is ready to up to the RR room.


#4, a class a climax has been living on my work bench, as it is tiny, and can let me know if other locomotives I'm working on have thier motors wired in the right direction


Bill Nelson

[gbwdude]

Since the weather has been favorable lately, lots of non model railroading stuff has been taking priority. Slowly I'm getting my truck fixed up after years of neglect (some of it my doing, mostly my parents lack of maintenance when I was gone to Korea and Afghanistan), things around the house are being mended, and the storage unit is getting cleared of excess clutter. Today is an exciting day for our daughter, she no longer sleeps in a crib and has taken our old full size bed and we've upgraded to a queen size. I listed a bunch of stuff on eBay and Campbell Yard Sales to buy new parts for my S10 and my upcoming trek back home to Wisconsin.

I did a little research on a pair of old passenger car trucks I got from señor Nelson and found out that the old Cape Line Models pair I have are Commonwealth four wheel trucks. http://hoseeker.net/capelines/capelinetruckspg1.jpg At first I thought the trucks may be too modern, but I remembered that the road's business car, #300 named the Lee W. Merrick after the prototype's founder, is truckless. In my opinion a 80' LaBelle car should have three axle trucks, but I might shorten the car to 70'.

Tyler

[Doctor G]

Tyler's beautiful box car, WRRY #37, is going to work on the Large Scale Little River Rail Road.

I has received body mount Kadee couplers ( about as big as half an HO steam engine when done in G scale) and is weathered a bit for the travels it is making from Wisconsin to Tennessee.

Timmie is excited about what is inside the box car.........the first electronic components for a trailing battery car for all the LRRR steam locomotives.

Pictured is a Printed Circuit Board with on/off switch and plug for the battery charger and all important fuse to prevent the "white smoke phenomena" noted with first time electric projects.

Doc Tom

[gbwdude]

Doc Tom,

That ol' boxcar looks amazing! I love the weathering job you did to it. The huge Kadee's look pretty neat on it too! I might just have to bring a note pad and take notes on how to weather cars. Some of my previous attempts were not so good, and since then I really haven't tried it (that and I joined the Army which took away a lot of my time). Anyways, I hope your new battery car works wonders for you!

Tyler

[Doctor G]

Originally Posted by gbwdude

Doc Tom,

That ol' boxcar looks amazing! I love the weathering job you did to it. The huge Kadee's look pretty neat on it too! I might just have to bring a note pad and take notes on how to weather cars. Some of my previous attempts were not so good, and since then I really haven't tried it (that and I joined the Army which took away a lot of my time). Anyways, I hope your new battery car works wonders for you!

Tyler

Hi Tyler,

Glad you liked the weathering. Actually the technique I used on this model is a little different than previous weathering. This is a technique proposed by Kevin Strang on the Garden RR websites. Here it is:

"I use acrylic paints (the cheap 99-cent Folk-Art or similar bottles from Michaels, etc.). I rarely actually mix the paint and the water together, rather I put some paint on a small plate or such, and have a cup of water next to it. I dip the brush in the water, pull a little paint onto the wet brush, and apply it. If I need it thinner on the model, I'll dip the brush back in the water and brush that onto the model to thin it."

This is basically an acrylic wash but his ideas offer a lot of control as far as thick or light. I used a very light technique on the WRRY box car.

Previous weathering jobs have been done by use of a India Ink wash first followed by dry brushing light colors after the India Ink wash.

Here are some pictures of India Ink and dry brush weathered RR stuff.

Glad to help with any weathering you want to get in to.

Tom

[gbwdude]

It seems like lately that my life is the song from The Guess Who, "No Time". At least stuff is selling decently on eBay to buy future railroad products. Enough venting for now...

I did make a recent purchase on eBay, a old (possibly) Varney or Roundhouse cast metal outside braced boxcar. It has Kadee's installed on it, but it was purchased with the intentions of falling victim to the most unusual form of copyright infringement: dissassembly to be duplicated. I plan to strip the paint and lettering off of it, dissect the car into each of it's core parts, make molds of the pieces, and then cast new parts. From there I can reassemble the car and have one duplicate of a interesting and out-of-production piece of rolling stock. More to follow, as if the first paragraph didn't explain it clearly enough... read it again.

Tyler

[Doctor G]

Tyler,
Casting parts sounds very interesting and I will be following your efforts .

I have never done that before. I am hoping to scratch-build some models for my Little River Railroad. I will be using sheet, tube, and rod styrene but some parts will require castings.

I hope to learn how to do this and will be real curious to see how you get it done. My shop guys are REAL interested.

Tom

[gbwdude]

My first attempt of casting turned out to be a failure. I decided to experiment instead of using the kit supplied cast material, the substitute being gasket RTV. Needless to say it just clung to the plastic door I tried to make a copy of. Lesson learned there.

The wonderful old eBay has supplied me with three more passenger cars. They are truly relics, as a little research showed they were old Selley cars. In this lot two were unbuilt and one was mostly assembled, I'm thinking one will remain a master for casting parts. They are neat looking cars and should paint up nicely in WRRy colors. Stay tuned for pics, and Bill and Tom (and whoever else) should check out trainlife.com for out of print magazines and to connect with other railheads.

Tyler

[Doctor G]

Originally Posted by gbwdude

My first attempt of casting turned out to be a failure. I decided to experiment instead of using the kit supplied cast material, the substitute being gasket RTV. Needless to say it just clung to the plastic door I tried to make a copy of. Lesson learned there.

The wonderful old eBay has supplied me with three more passenger cars. They are truly relics, as a little research showed they were old Selley cars. In this lot two were unbuilt and one was mostly assembled, I'm thinking one will remain a master for casting parts. They are neat looking cars and should paint up nicely in WRRy colors. Stay tuned for pics, and Bill and Tom (and whoever else) should check out trainlife.com for out of print magazines and to connect with other railheads.

Tyler

Keep trying you will get the hang of it soon .....and then you will be the expert at casting. I need to cast multiples of sugar cane cars for my On30 layout and await your mastering of the learning curve.

Ebay has been good to you.

I just bought my second ever train model on Ebay the Large Scale makings of a 4-6-2 Prarie locomotive to bash a model of Little River RR #110. The model and mechanism was inexspensive. The shipping of these heavy Large Scale beasts was $19 though.

Thanks for the tip on the train website. I will be checking it out.

Doc Tom

[Bill Nelson]

I did some castings of small parts in the 1970's using open faced molds and steel filled epoxy. I made some porch brackets, wood stoves. never did get to the big stuff, other than my scenery rocks, and my Iron furnaces in plaster.



I want to learn how to do a two sided mold sometime


Bill

[gbwdude]

Gents,

I've been slacking at updating in the WRRy world. To be honest, not much has happened. I did bust out my casting kit in early July and attempted to cast new parts using a old Roundhouse outside braced cast metal boxcar kit that was partly disassembled. Soon after making the molds I found out two things: tinfoil is a decent alternative to building boxes for your molds and either my kitchen table is not balanced right or the floor is off kilter (I'm guessing the latter). The parts came out well detailed but heavy on one side due to the uneven surface the mold laid on. It was a good learning experience, and now I know what not to do.

Lately I've rekindled one of my other projects. I wanted to have a display shelf made back in May so I cut up the wood. Just yesterday I started sanding down everything and getting it ready for stain. I'm going to try to stain it the same colors as the wood stuff in our bedroom as that's where it'll go for now.

Attached are a few pics of what I've done so far, both in the casting and the woodworking world.

Tyler