Tuesday, September 21, 2010

New Railway Recollections Caboose Kit

Barry at Railway Recollections has a new HOn30 16 foot off center cupola caboose kit that is ready to ship. It is $29.00 plus $6.50 shipping and handling.
I don't have the kit but I can recommend Barry's kits in general. His kits have no bubbles and sharp castings. They are well designed and straight-forward to build.

To order contact Barry at barry@railrec.com

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

HOn30 Pictures

In case you had not seen this elsewhere here's a link to Peter Bartlett's pictures of his HOn30 motive power, rolling stock and layout. Peter's Cray Valley RR was featured in the August 2004 issue of Model Railroader. Enjoy!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cray_valley_rr_-_stock/4982443862/in/photostream

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Climax Kit

I have not done much on the Climax kit. I was unsure of weather to add a DCC decoder and how to paint it. I will wait to add the decoder because I need a smaller one like the TCS Z4.

I did not want to paint it with a lot of raw wood because my railroad would have painted it more like a common carrier road engine. But I had not seen many paint jobs like that on a class A Climax. My friend, Phil Gliebe, built a Climax that won first place in the steam kit class at the NMRA national convention and was mentioned in the NMRA magazine in Sept. His paint job is exactly what the FS&K would have used and removed that obstacle.

I still have other projects to finish, but this one will come to the top of list this winter and I will post pictures as it proceeds.

What's on the Workbench

I am currently working on 2 projects:

The ARU railbus: I have it painted, but not yet decaled or weathered. I am working on painting the driver and passengers, following an article by Sam Swanson (Model Railroader Dec 2005). I will post photos soon.

Track modifications on the Linekin Bay Module: To improve running I have removed the AHM dual gauge crossing and flattened it. The HOn30 leg always had a hump so that the track could reach the height of the standard gauge and this was causing problems for smaller locomotives. The crossing is back in place but needs ballast. At the same time I removed all the track to the right of the crossing all the way to the swing bridge because there were rough spots and widening of the gauge at the swing bridge. I have replaced the bridge track and am weathering new strip wood decking for it prior to securing it back onto the module.

Updates

I am sorry to leave this blog so long without an update. I am still here and modeling in HOn30.

If you went to the last National Narrow Gauge Convention you could have bought one of Mount Blue's new laser-cut HOn30 Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington box cars kits. This builds into car # 309 which survives still at the WW&F museum. This is very exciting for those of us (myself included) who are WW&F fans. They are available on-line also at mountbluemodelco.com/HO.htm.

I have one of Mt Blues SRRL box cars under construction (see photos in a previous post) and can highly recommend them. The 309 kit will have details included.

Railway Recollections is releasing a 42 foot steam launch on HO scale that will be perfect for harbor scenes. It looks similar to the out-of production steam launch that Sheepscot Scale models released over 10 years ago, but being cast in high-quality resin will be of better quality. I have seen pre-production photos of the engine detail and it is superb. The packaging is being completed now so I expect it will be released in the next few months. You can buy direct via email: barry@railrec.com or ask about it at Train and Trooper: www.trainandtrooper.com. This is a different kit from their 38 foot launch/tour boat.