My latest ebay bargains turned up today, a Genesis SD75i in BNSF livery and an Atlas Silver B23-7 in CSX livery.
These engines were very cheap, and although I don't model BNSF, I plan to strip the shell, remove the extra vent housing and fill the cab baffle line to backdate the engine to a standard SD70m and repaint it as a CSX locomotive.
The B23-7 is intended to become the chassis for my Norfolk Southern 8-32B project, using the Railpower 8-40B shell I purchased back in January.
The SD75i has some slight damage to the front handrails, and some very slight glue fogging on the front windshield but I have replacement parts for both of those areas already, so that shouldn't cause any problems. I'm assuming that the extra vent section on the right hand side of the engine will unclip as it seems to be a seperate piece, and therefore it will be easy to convert the locomotive to a SD70m.
My latest project locomotives have arrived, I am planning to build two standard cab GP60's in Norfolk Southern livery, and I am using this basket-case BNSF GP60M as the basis for one of them. I bought this engine very cheaply on ebay, and it is a little worse for wear, the cab mounting lug is broken and the sideframes and some of the handrails are completely missing.
The second GP60 will be built from this New-Old-Stock Railpower Products kit, again this is a GP60M, but I plan to use Cannon & Co parts to create a spartan cab for it. This kit was bought from MG Sharp Models, as they seem to have a few RPP kits still in their inventory.
Here is a quick test showing how the Athearn spartan cab will fit onto the GP60M as a replacement for the wide cab.
I was spurred on to this project by the blue-box 'GP60' Athearn conversion I bought at the NMRA spring meet, that locomotive may also recieve a comprehensive makeover to join these two as a more accurate GP60 with correct frame length and other details, or it might return to being a regular GP50 and being stripped of it's extra details and parts.
Work is still ongoing with the NS 5723 GP38-2 ex Conrail unit, the paint has been added and I will update on that model soon. Watch this space.
My latest engine arrived in the post today. It's an Athearn Genesis SD70M in Norfolk Southern livery. This engine represents one of the ex-Conrail units aquired during the merger and features a standard 'spartan' cab instead of the more usual wide cab configuration.
This model is in superb condition and doesn't appear to have been run at all. The only thing wrong with it is that the instruction leaflet and the extra cab parts sprues are missing (the windscreen wipers).
I can probably dig up some spare wipers in the parts box, but it's a shame that they are missing, especially as the engine is otherwise mint.
I'm very excited to have this locomotive as I've been looking for one for a while and they seem to be difficult to find. Athearn only produced a single run of them back in 2001 and they haven't been re-issued since, and when I saw them advertised in an old issue of Model Railroader I loved the look of the old-style cab on the modern hood, and the little details like the ice cover on the hood and the spare knuckle basket.
This new engine brings the second Genesis locomotive onto the roster, and also adds another Norfolk Southern unit in the black paint scheme - most of my other engines are awaiting repaints or will depict patched units.
