Model Railroading > Signal Saturday/Sunday

This took so long it will be Signal Sunday when this finally posts!  Turned out to be a great train day.  Did some car work as I posted earlier (those cars are back by the right hand signal in the photo).  And then this afternoon I was able to show my niece and nephews my trains and let them run them for a few minutes.  They had fun, even with all of the hiccups and derailments.  Tonight after I got my little carmen in bed, I decided to play with some of my new Atlas signals.  Thanks to a YouTube video, I was able to find the right DigiKey part that plugs into the Atlas Signal System plug.  It's still a lot of fidgeting to get the right color to light, but was happy to get things working tonight.  You can see all the wires in the background and my little breadboard to drive everything.  Fortunately this was a staged photo, had to run the wires through the trains.  Maybe next time I can get a video.  I even tried image stacking for the first time, used ON1 Photo Raw this evening.  Still have lots to learn, but it's funny that I'm finally getting around to trying it after seeing articles about it over the years.

I used to love the posts from the late Gary (P5r24) where he would have post photos of his model trains with a story behind the action - Preserving the SP in HO scale: The Leesdale Local.  So in his memory, here is my little story for tonight's scene:

It's summer 1995, and while I'm usually chasing the Santa Fe Superfleets a few hundre yards south on the Stockton sub, especially the 199 train, today I spent some time watching the SP.  While hanging out at Giant, really the northern end of Richmond, CA near the ATSF Northbay yard, I was able to catch two trains in the same frame thanks to the SP & the State of California reubuilding the former California Pacific (Cal-P) into a double-track CTC setup to improve the performance of the Amtrak California San Joaquin and Capital Corridor trains..  SP 2733 is switching coil cars at the Bethlehem Steel plant, with the remainder of it's train, including some emtpy hoppers cars from Granite Rock's quarry south of San Jose, sitting on Main 1.  In the background on Main 2, SP Tunnel Motor #8496 hustles east with a string of autoracks from Milpitas, probably with some Toyotas from the NUMI plant.  The Rio Grande inspired Speed Lettering sure looks good on the SP, much cleaner looking than the SP I grew up with.  It was worth spending a frame of film on this scene, will try for the Superfleet another day.

*SP 2733 was my first DCC (+ sound) locomotive that I picked up on a random visit to the Train Shoppe at it's old Salt Lake City location years ago.  Still hoping Athearn will do a Genesis version of the Cruds (SW1500), but the MP15AC will work for now.  SP 8496 is a Scale Trains Tunnel Motor, the sounds are fantastic.  Model trains are cool, but adding sound to the mix sure is a lot of fun, especially for the kids - ok, so I'm a kid too!

Nathan



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/03/23 23:40 by atsf121.

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Wow Nathan.  You really went all out in modeling the details of the very late Southern Pacific.  In your scene, the SP has but one year to live, and you have very accurately modeled the headlight arrangement from this era.  I see the red gyralight has been removed from the nose of SP 8496 (SD40T-2) along with the upper headlight, and the MP15AC has had some of its as-built headlights removed.  The flying Southern Pacific is period correct and all three units look sharp.  I saw your carmen in your previous post.  I'll bet they really like spending time with the trains.  Reminds me of my brother and I with our late Father, so many years ago.

Gary

Agree with Gary, nice to see you getting your family involved in the hobby.  Thanks for the recent posts of your layout.

Rich (brother of WP921)

Thanks Gary & Rich, the kids grow up too fast!