Athearn GP50 - Basket Case

Another basket case engine, this one from the NMRA Spring Meet 2011.

This engine is a bit of a mess, it's got a strange mixture of detail parts and home-built details, with unevenly cut plasticard pieces and what appear to be stips of solder for MU cables.

The motor mounts have disintegrated, so a major part of the job will be rebuilding the drive and adding DCC.

 It's labeled as a GP60, but the detailing is damaged so I will most likely be stripping it back to a bare shell and repainting it to become a Norfolk Southern GP50.

NMRA Spring Meet - Lawford, Essex

Today was the NMRA British Region Spring Meet, held in Lawford, Essex with the Thamesiders group.  The event was faily low-key, but there were a selection of layouts, and some traders in attendance.  I picked up a couple of unbuilt Rix smalltown USA buildings and a Walthers crossing overhead gantry, and I also picked up a very rough basket-case Athearn blue box GP50.

Layouts were the large Thamesiders Essex Belt Lines HO modular setup which was being used for 'run what you brung' sesssions, and Dan Spaldings excellent Grain Belt layout Galetia in HO.  There was also a display of Locomotives from Twin Falls Lumber on On30 (winner of the Mayor’s Cup at the NEC 2010 show) and a handful of how-to sessions on scenery and kit-building.

 Thamesiders Essex Belt Lines in HO

California Coast in Z scale by Dave Dawes (its final year!)

Galetia, KS by Dan Spalding in HO (excellent weathered freight cars and realistic operation).

An example of how to model realistic logging operations.

The Athearn Genesis SD70m - Progress Update

Close up showing the original 'weathering' that was heavily applied to the entire shell.


The shell after cleaning off all the black paint.


The reassembled chassis, with rebuilt and cleaned trucks and the temporary DC board for testing.

I've started putting my basket case SD70M back together, the shell has been washed off to get rid of the weird 'weathering' applied by the previous owner, and I have reassembled and cemented the various parts including the drive train.

I've got a detail kit on the way for the locomotive, and an MRC sound decoder and bass speaker, so for now the engine is fitted with a temporary DC board so I could make sure it ran okay, which it certainly did!

The rebuild wasn't all plain sailing, I had to bend the copper frame pick-ups to straighten the trucks, and remove some tiny unidentified pieces of plastic from jamming the gears, but the new wheelset worked a treat, and also had the added bonus of being blackened wheels instead of the shiny original type.

Next task will be the detailing and number change, once my detail kit arrives.

Athearn GP38 Rebuild - The painting process begins.

Following an afternoon with a makeshift spraybooth, I've got the first coats of paint onto 5273.

It's my first time using an airbrush in twenty years, so predictably the first attempt went disasterously wrong... with runs and blobs in the paint.

A panic moment for sure, but thanks to the miracle of acrylic paint, it was one which was quickly fixed by washing the primer off before it dried.

The second attempt went perfectly and the colour coat went on without a hitch.

I'm using Pollyscale Conrail Blue, but it's drying a very different colour from my Athearn SD50 shell and my Atlas 8-40B. This could be a problem later on as I need to partially repaint my SD50 shell... so I will need to research for a paint colour that will match the Athearn blue exactly.

Here's some shots to show how the painting for 5273 went down.


The makeshift cardboard spray booth.


The shell ready for paint.


The primed shell.


The rear details of the primed shell.


The painted handrails.


The painted fan grilles.


Rear view of the painted shell.


Side view of the painted shell.


Next I will be masking and spraying the black parts of the shell, adding the damaged sections of paint on the nose and roof, and then adding the Conrail decals prior to weathering.

The chassis is also underway, although I need to get some better reference images to help place the various fuel tank details from the Cannon kit.

Athearn GP38 Rebuild - Shell is complete

Front - MU cables, ditch lights and more.
Rear - Showing replacement fans.
Side - Sunshade (only this side as per prototype) and replacement step edge.

Another couple of hours sorted out the remaining details for the shell, and I now have all the fans in place, the mu hoses, ditch lights and cab sunshade.

It's looking pretty good, and I'm pleased with the results, the pictures show it with the original plastic horn, as I had ordered the wrong type when I bought the parts for this build. However as luck would have it I managed to find the correct type of horn on a replacement shell I had bought back when I first started this engine and was planning to bin the original due to the broken mounting lugs.

The next step is to prime the shell and then lay on the Conrail blue.

The Cats Whiskers

Using my newly purchased CSX SD60 as a guide, I was able to rebuild the wiring and get the basket-case Conrail SD50 chassis back on the rails. 

Unfortunately the shell for it is still needing a lot of work and is missing some detail parts and roof sections, so I recently bought a cheap Athearn SD50 shell in Chessie livery which I had intended to use for parts to repair the basket case.

However, once I recieved it, the Chessie shell turned out to be in totally mint condition, and having fitted it to the (now working) chassis I've now got a great looking engine - albeit one from a road the no longer exists and is not in my modelling timeframe.  :)

The Conrail shell repair is still on the to-do list, although I need some detail parts to finish it, and therefore I probably need to source yet another shell for that!  Once the Conrail shell is finally fixed I will probably keep both shells, to run the locomotive as a Chessie from time to time just for kicks.

Athearn GP38 Rebuild - Progress Update

Time for an update on progress with this build.  Thanks to the bank holiday weekend I managed to get some time to work on 5273, and after a few more hours work it's coming along very nicely.







Today I added the plow, lift rings, rear fan grab iron, fans and rear coupler lift bar. Tomorrow should see the final details added to the shell and perhaps even a coat of primer (which will be nervewracking as I haven't touched an airbrush in twenty years).

I'm really enjoying bringing this engine back from the edge, and it's been a really good way to get back into modeling after all these years, especially as this amount of detail was really difficult to achieve back when I was last railroading, there was simply no easy way to get hold of many of these parts at the time.

Crawley Show Report

On Sunday I attended the Crawley Model Railway Society as part of the Seaboard Southern club, hosting the NMRA stand.  We had our N Gauge demonstration layout and a table with promotional flyers and poster advertising the club and the NMRA.

As it turned out, the show was held on the same day as the nearby Epsom model railway show, an unfortunate clash which meant that the potential audience for both shows was diluted, and on top of that it was a gloriously sunny day so the attendance was not particularly high.

The show comprised of over forty trade stands and layouts, spread out over two halls, there was a canteen serving hot food and drinks, and a live steam railway outside offering rides for visitors.

Among the layouts there were several US outline layouts on display, and trader LSWR models was there with a selection of US ready to run rolling stock and locomotives.

It was a long day spent manning our display, talking to visitors and potential new members for the club, and running the layout or supervising the various children who stopped by to have a go at operating tiny n gauge trains.  Lots of fun was had by all who visited our corner of the show.

A selection of photos from the show.

Santa Barbara – N Scale

Coeur d’Alene – On30 Gauge

Lazy River – HO Scale

Seaboard Southern and NMRA Stand – N Gauge

Trainwest Exhibition - Bentley - April 2011

I drove down to the Bentley Model Railway Groups exhibition Trainwest 2011, which was held in a sports centre in Wiltshire.  A long drive down, passing landmarks like Stonehenge, and on the way back I swung by to collect my ebay purchased Model Railroader magazines from Oxford (as covered in my previous post).

So Trainwest was a mixed bag, especially as the one trader I was interested in was a no-show, the Western Models second-hand US dealer.  I had been hoping to pick up some more detail parts and some more Athearn for my roster (as if I don't have enough projects waiting in the wings as it is...)

There were several US layouts attending the show and I spent time looking at each of them, especially Chris Gilberts small switching layout Haston Nomad which looked like a good potential track-plan for my own portable layout/module board.

I enjoyed the show, although the no-show for Western Models was a bit of a dissapointment, but hopefully the upcoming NMRA spring meet at the end of the month will allow for some secondhand bargains.

I've posted a few photographs from the show below.

Haston Nomad Ho Scale - Chris Gilbert

Roundhouse Ho Scale - Ian Lampkin

Red River N Scale - Tony Comber

Parsons Lumber Company On30 - Richard Turner & Mick Moignard

Oakland 3rd Street Yard Gauge 1 - Martyn Wild