Model Railroading > GP30 Heritage

Story and phone typing both very impressive!

TJY

Hi Larry. In parsing through your link, I noticed the review of the Centralia P85BR. Did you ever do any upgrades you can share?

King_Coal Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi Larry. In parsing through your link, I noticed
> the review of the Centralia P85BR. Did you ever do
> any upgrades you can share?

I'm not the owner of the website.  

ʎɹɹɐl

I tried to edit something, and the message vanished.  When I click edit, quote, or private reply it reappears but only for me.  I never saw that bug before.  Here it is again, warts and all. 

[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]I met Jerry Moyers at a Summerail about 8-10 years ago and we talked about GP30's.  [/color]

[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]I think he did admit to copying the fan layout from an earlier [/color][color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]drawing, EMD or otherwise.  

At the time they all were wrong.  

And the rivets [/color][color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.701961)]were left off the roof due to the wrong copy being given to Lionel.[/color]


In spite of the many brands and drives there are only three plastic HO GP30's.

1. Athearn
2. Moyers
3. Proto

The Moyers shell was the best diesel shell on the market at the time, a phase 2 with The Fan Mistake and missing rivets.  Richard Yaremko was one of the first to recognize its potential.  He built a non-DB Soo unit with a modified Athearn GP35 drive and wrote an article in Prototype Modeler in 1978 or 79.  That inspired me to build my N&W unit, actually my 4th start and the only one surviving.  It’s a phase 2 and should be a phase 1 and it has the Fan Mistake *and* the brow mistake but for 1979 a non-horrible model.  I used Athearn’s old metal blob-bergs and the Lionel plastic handrails.
Moyers shell was initially available only from Lionel in 1977 with the sidewinder single power truck, “stripples” sideframes, and you had to buy
the entire Lionel “Burlington 181” train set to get one.  Fortunately that wasn’t terribly expensive.  $52 from Johnnys.  The set had 181 pieces, and the BN green bean GP30 was also numbered 181.  If you have one of these in a Lionel box consider it an artifact and a souvenir of the third of Lionel’s five failed attempts to get into HO scale.

I scored a second one from a broken open set in Kmart.  For ten bucks.  Still a steep price just for a shell... Athearn shells were about 2 bucks at the time and Atlas were about 5.  But sure beat 52.

After Lionel died out of HO again... their next foray would bring us the FA Railcam... the Kader tooled, Moyers designed shell became a Bachmann product where it was pretty much unchanged other than being offered in more paint schemes including the famous warbonnet and everbody remembers seeing red and silver warbonnet GP30s, no doubt with unit trains of Auto-Loaders laden with 1973 Studebakers.

At this point the popularity of the Moyers shell caused it to be produced as an undec, where it turned up in no particular order as a Front Range product with TAPP trucks (and nice Mashima motors), a Bev-Bel product in an Athearn box with an Athearn GP35 drive in various schemes and undec, and as bagged undec shell kits with thr Bev-Bel label.  I think there may have been a
ConCor incarnation as well.

After Bachmann showed some promise with their Spectrum GE 44-tonner, they proceeded to urinate in the soup with a crappy F40PH (continuing a trend not broken until virtually all of the prototypes were out of service and a crazy
Canadian finally got it right), a REALLY crappy C40-8, and... a Spectrum version of the Moyers GP30.  By this time Jerry’s tooling must have felt
like an aging Templar searching for the grail... it was still a pretty good shell but had yet to be married to a decent drive.

The Botch Brothers added the missing rivets, which must have taken about a half hour.  They did tool up some finer delrin handrails (speaking of trends).  It had an all wheel drive of conventional design including flywheels but it really wasn’t a very good runner.  The occasional lucky smoothie but even the ones that didn’t rumble and chatter out of the box eventually wore out their bearings.  Decades of industry experience simply ignored.  Solid brass instead of oilite bronze.

The worst thing about the Spectrum GP30s though, were the metal grabirons.  Picture Les Gold from Hard Core Pawn saying “you want grabs we got grabs”.  Thus the term “hot melt coathangers” was introduced.  By me.  If you pulled them off to replace them with something finer like DA wire grabs, you left behind huge holes that indeed appeared to have been melted
into the shell.

In July of 1998 I got wind that Life Like might be working on a GP30.  I spoke to Larry Grubb, LL’s product dev guy at the Kansas City NMRA Convention with just a notice:  IF you guys are working on a GP30, don’t make The Fan Mistake.  Larry said oh no problem, we do all our measurements from the prototype from scratch.

Apparently, except for the fan hatch.

Y’all know that story.  I believe it was a combination of Hussey, Ryan, and Chatfield that got it fixed, backed up by EMD factory erection plans provided by Ron Sebastian.  So the Proto 2000 GP30 released in March of 1999 was built
after the prototype and EMD erection drawings, rather than the EMD painting
diagram / sales literature that had driven the others as well as all published drawings.

I wasn’t going to type this all on my phone but once I got started... the eye-fone 8plus has a slightly larger keyboard than my old 6.  Slightly less error prone and larger than a pop tart.  I’m open to suggestions for a new tag line.  Not hot pocket, a product actually considerably more disgusting than an Apple phone.  Android phone... could go either way.


Sent from my little plastic pop tart



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/20/17 11:02 by Larry020.

Clear the are folks, Nothing to see here, nothing to see. Go on home. Nothing to see here. - Police squad movie.

King_Coal Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hi Larry. In parsing through your link, I noticed
> the review of the Centralia P85BR. Did you ever do
> any upgrades you can share?

Andy said

I never did anything with the Centralia cars except test run them and
gradually sell off half of the six.  The only upgrades they really need are
interiors.  I was hoping Ron would release some of the five other cars that
can be done on the same core, but that never happened either.

Andy