Superior bakeries and more vintage kits.

Spurred on by the Art Curren kit mingling project, I landed another haul of vintage kits from the 'bay, including a pair of Revell Superior Bakeries - one boxed and the other pre-built, I've lost count of how many of these I have now but it must be at least a dozen.

I also picked up an Atlas Lumber Yard with office, another of those classic kits that must have featured on pretty much every US outline layout ever made, as well as numerous kit-bashing articles and features over the years.

The final kit in this lot is a vintage Heljan NMRA Headquarters Building, a curious model that replicates the custom built building in Chattanooga, TN that houses the administration staff for the NMRA.  

The real-life building has been designed to look like a typical railroad station and is complete with overhanging roof and upper viewing tower.

The kit contains the usual Heljan pre-coloured plastic components and captures the shape of the building well, although I'm not sure of the colour chosen as the kits dark red brick seems at odd with the images I have seen of the real building.

The kit seemed like it would be a good starting point for a kitbash into a smaller station building, and as it was going cheap I picked it up.  However looking at the parts it has a few problems, including poor fit and also a large section of the wall has the NMRA sign and logo cast into the plastic.

These kits will join the growing pile of vintage plastic in the spare room, which more than ever resembles the stockroom of an eighties model shop!  I really do need to get some more listings onto ebay to clear some space.

Atlas and an unexpected Kato...

I managed to pick up an Atlas C30-7 on ebay for £30 - perfect for the Redbird project, and much more detailed than the Railpower shell.

This model was advertised as having a missing fuel tank, but I also picked up a box of assorted detail parts from the same seller and discovered the missing fuel tank was actually in the second lot.  So I have a complete C30-7 ready for stripping and detailing.

The second lot was advertised as containing a railpower GP35 shell, which I though might be useful to swap with the Athearn RTR I bought recently (the Athearn RTR is based on the Railpower shell). 

However when I looked at the GP35 shell it turned out to be a Kato GP35, not a Railpower, so I'm not sure what I will do with that one.  I don't have any Kato spares, and there are no handrails or cab glazing for the shell.  It is beautifully detailed with walkway tread and very finely cast details, so I will probably try to get it up and running some day, perhaps on an adapted Railpower chassis.

The rest of the lot was an assortment of whitemetal detail parts and some Atlas details, along with a stripped blue-box GP9 shell.

Kato Geep - another ebay cheapie

I picked up another older Kato, this one is a GP7 that was marketed by Atlas in the late eighties.  It's unboxed but in good condition, the previous owner has applied some weathering using chalks or powders, but it seems like that will rub off without any problems.

I'm loving the weight of this unit, it's got a solid metal frame, and the body detail is very nice, apart from the moulded on grab-irons. It's a shame that Kato didn't take a leaf from Athearns book and only mould in the location dimples.

The walkways include tread detail on the lower edges, and the plastic handrails are not too oversized, looking more or less the same as a modern Kato unit in thickness.

I will be repainting this model along with my brass geep, both of them becoming locomotives for my planned Peoria layout.

Clearing the backlog - DCC Programming

I spent some time at the decoder station at the club space tonight and managed to clear seven locomotives into their correct numbering ready for DCC service.

Kato CSX SD70MAC back in one piece (mostly) and DCC fitted.

I also reassembled my basket-case Kato SD70MAC, rebuilding the cab and handrails.  I still need to fit the smaller grab-irons and some of the pilot details to the front end.

Roster shot of the eight locomotives I worked on this evening.

There were eight locomotives in tonights batch, and I got seven of them up and running and logged into the roster using the Sprog Decoder, and then each of them was run in on the test track for ten minutes or so.

One of the hornby decoders I had turned out to be fried, so the Kato Dash 9 in the foreground above will need to wait on the workbench a little longer.  That locomotive is in bad cosmetic shape, so it will need a considerable amount of work before it is presentable, the cab glass is fogged with cement and there is a lot of other spilled glue and missing details around the shell.

A couple of Conrail shells...

I've been looking for a replacement shell for my Atlas Union Pacific Dash 9-40cw and I finally managed to get hold of one in Conrail Blue, so I've neatly side-stepped the problem of stripping and repainting such an excellently detailed model.

The replacement shell is in good shape, but mising a couple of smaller details, and it needs new handrails.

I also picked up yet another Railpower SD90 shell to use as parts for my SD80 conversion project.

Now all I need is some time to spend at the modelling bench to get some of these projects underway!