Here In Canada we have a chain of grocery stores called The great canadian Superstore. There are other stores that are owned by the same parent company as well. Anyway every year around Christmas the stores issue a train set called the president's choice. It is usually a fairly good IHC locomotive and rolling stock along with the standard brass loop of track and cheap transformer.
The whole set sells for about 100$ and the real prize is the engine. This past year the engine issued was a Canadian national Hudson:
Above is my engine before i did anything to it. It comes with a way-to-long vanderbuilt tender and elephant-ear smoke deflectors. My club bought two, one we have kept stock, the other I have modifyed. I shortened the tender to a better length, taking an inch off the back and I removed the 'ears'. removing the ears was easier than I though since they were attached to the greed running board skirts which were in turn tack-cemented over the original running boards. The skirts are gently pried off and discarded. I then repainted the entire engine in black, touching up the cab windows in red and white on the running boards:
Decals are by CDS decals
In this picture you can see the size of the peice of the tender i removed:
Since I did this engine I shortened my own unit's tender and remover the smoke deflectors on the engine. To remove just the smoke deflectors I removed the skirts and used a razor saw to cut the defectors off. Then I just re-glued the skirts back on the engine.
My next project on one of these things it to convert it into a Canadian Pacific-looking engine, repainting the Cab and skirts in Tuscan red and trying to find a square long-haul tender. This'll be another engine for a fellow modeler.
The whole set sells for about 100$ and the real prize is the engine. This past year the engine issued was a Canadian national Hudson:
Above is my engine before i did anything to it. It comes with a way-to-long vanderbuilt tender and elephant-ear smoke deflectors. My club bought two, one we have kept stock, the other I have modifyed. I shortened the tender to a better length, taking an inch off the back and I removed the 'ears'. removing the ears was easier than I though since they were attached to the greed running board skirts which were in turn tack-cemented over the original running boards. The skirts are gently pried off and discarded. I then repainted the entire engine in black, touching up the cab windows in red and white on the running boards:
Decals are by CDS decals
In this picture you can see the size of the peice of the tender i removed:
Since I did this engine I shortened my own unit's tender and remover the smoke deflectors on the engine. To remove just the smoke deflectors I removed the skirts and used a razor saw to cut the defectors off. Then I just re-glued the skirts back on the engine.
My next project on one of these things it to convert it into a Canadian Pacific-looking engine, repainting the Cab and skirts in Tuscan red and trying to find a square long-haul tender. This'll be another engine for a fellow modeler.
