Lately I’ve been trying to get some projects done that have kind of languished for a while…
First off, I finally finished my the first passenger car for my railroad. It’s an old Bachmann combine that I repainted in my RR’s colors and lettering. The decals were provided by Stan Cedarleaf.
I had started this several years ago. I added aluminum tape to the roof to give it a more realistic appearance, prior to painting it. I also removed the couplers from the trucks and added body mounted couplers, as well as metal wheels. I had planned to replace most of the plastic details with more accurate parts and addition details, but decided it wasn’t worth it. I’d rather wait until I can build something from scratch, and then go nuts with the details. Anyway, here’s how it looks. The paint is actually burgundy, but for some reason it looks very red in the photos:
At the moment, it has no interior lighting because I lost those parts. At some point I’ll put in LEDs. I also have a couple coaches that I plan to repaint to match, for a complete passenger train.
Next up was to refurbish some of my oldest structures. The hoist house of the Cliffside Mine needed a little work – the paint on the door and windows had badly faded, and the door had fallen off. They look much better now:
The ruins of the blacksmith shop, at the abandoned Monolith Mine, was also faded. Here’s how it looks after touching up the paint. Someday I want to build a replacement for it using my current modeling techniques:
The biggest job was refurbishing the water tower near the town of Dos Manos. The supports were made from real wood (western red cedar), and most of the paint had peeled off. The wood on top of the platform was heavily weathered and worn. The tank also needed repainting. Most of all, the original spout needed to be replaced – not only was it beginning to fall apart, I was never happy with it to begin with. Now I have the skills to make a better one.
In this photo you can see the old spout, with the new spout below it. The old spout was made from cardboard tubes coated with fiberglass resin, and spray painted silver. The mounting brackets were crudely made from brass rod. The new spout is entirely made of brass:
The prototype for my model is an old San Diego & Arizona RR water tower located at Dos Cabesas, in the Anza-Borrego desert. The prototype has an unusual, hinge-like hardware. Without any good photos of the tower when its spout was still intact, it’s difficult to determine exactly how the spout was attached, and how it operated. My original spout worked but did not seem very practical or realistic. When I built the new brass spout, I tried the configuration shown in the next photo:
That didn’t really look right, and didn’t work very well either. So here’s the configuration I settled on:
Here’s how the finished tower looks, with new paint and new spout:
The foundation has small brass pins sticking up, which fit into holes in the ends of the support timbers, to hold it in place.
