That’s a lot of Zephyr cars. Nice stuff, great product, but how about a C&NW 400 instead?
PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENT: HO California Zephyrs are coming Summer 2012! Don't miss them, PREORDER today!
Over at Mike’s Train House. I didn’t realize they were doing them. Check Out The Details And See It In Action: The HO GG-1 Electric
Great time for Eastern and New England modelers with Con Cor doing a Reading Crusader, a New Haven Blue Comet, and PPR MU Cars. Now how about some IC electrics for us Chicagoans?
Video below….
This past Monday, November 7, 2011 Rapido made model railroad history by commissioning from Creaform to perform the first-ever 3D scan of a real MLW/ALCO FA locomotive: FPA4 #6765 at Exporail, Canada's national railway museum in Montreal, Quebec. Jason, Dan and I all were in attendance as were about 30 of our customers who came up to join in the day's events.
A friend assures me the 400 can’t be far behind if Walthers is doing these cars. Just announced this Month and due Feb 2012.
Finally, someone is doing an Electric in HO for the midwest modeler and they couldn't have started with a better model. MTH will be doing them in both Milwaukee Road and South Shore schemes. From MTH on the O scale version,By the late 1940s, the engines on the Milwaukee Road's electrified Rocky Mountain Division were nearly three decades old and tired, and diesels were the wave of the future. Management was intending to pull down the overhead wires and dieselize the entire division. Then along came a big electric named Little Joe, and the wires stayed up for another quarter-century.
The Joes were actually built for another customer half a world away, Russia's Trans-Siberian Railroad. But by the time they were ready to deliver in 1948, the Cold War had frozen sales to the Soviet Union, and builder General Electric was stuck with twenty 5,500 hp locomotives designed to run on 3,300 volts DC - most built to Russian 5' track gauge. As the Milwaukee Road was one of the few American railroads with overhead DC power (at 3,000 volts), GE offered the entire order, including spare parts, to the Milwaukee at the fire sale price of one million dollars. At least one unit, painted in GE demo colors, was tested on both of the road's electrified divisions in 1948 and acquired the nickname "Little Joe" after Joe Stalin.
But the Milwaukee came up with reasons not to make the purchase, and in 1949 three units went to the Chicago, South Shore and South Bend Railroad for freight service. They lasted until 1983, earning the honor of last electric engines in US mainline common-carrier freight service. Brazil's Paulista Railroad bought five more Joes, nicknamed them Russas and operated them until 1999.
An upsurge of traffic from the Korean War convinced the Milwaukee it had made a mistake, and in August 1950 it purchased the remaining 12 Joes, without spare parts, for the original million-dollar price. All went to the Rocky Mountain Division between Harlowton, Montana and Avery, Idaho - ten designated EF-4 for freight service and two as EP-4s for Olympian Hiawatha passenger trains. Engineers loved the new Joes because they were more reliable than the road's ancient boxcabs and much less stressful to operate.
Originally the freight units worked in pairs, with a boxcab helper added on the division's tougher grades. But later in the 1950s a GP9 was attached to the Little Joe pairs and controlled from the lead Joe; this combination could run straight through electrified territory without adding or dropping helpers. By the following decade, Joes were simply cut in ahead of the freight diesels at the beginning of electrified territory, with the Joe's engineer controlling all units. Eventually, however, second-generation diesels brought an end to electrification, and on June 15, 1974, the last Little Joes folded their pantographs - ending 58 years, 6 months, and 16 days of Milwaukee main line electrification. While most of the Joes were scrapped, three survive today: one Milwaukee Road unit in Deer Lodge, Montana, and South Shore units at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Illinois and the Lake Shore Railway Historical Museum in North East, PA, just ten miles from the GE plant where it was built.
New for 2010, the M.T.H. Little Joe duplicates the brute strength and dependability of the original, complete with a detailed die-cast metal body and, for the first time in HO, operating pantographs that raise and lower automatically according to the direction of travel.
Our next workshop is scheduled for Thurs. November 29th at 7:30. We will begin construction on the Black River Junction layout that was featured in Model Railraoder starting with the January 2007 issue.Wish him luck... I'll try and visit one of the workshops.
Like any layout we will start by constructing the benchwork. Be a part of this project and learn how really simple it is to build your own model railroad. Unlike the layout in the series we will be using cork roadbed and code 83 Atlas FlexTrack.
Structures and Trains by Fred
DATE: November 29th, 2007 Address: 12 North Second Street
TIME: 7:30 PM Geneva, IL. 60134
For Information: 630.208.9011 or 630.584.3429
Future Work Shops:
Black River Junction (We will actually build this layout )
Structures: Plastic & Craftsman Kits building, Painting and Weathering
Digital Command & Control
Scenery Construction
MTH takes some flak in comments over at Model Railroader, This model is the least asked for model in any poll I have seen, but here it is!!!!!!!!!It's not on my wish list, but it's a very neat looking model. I might become an Erie fan.
WOW! I can't wait to run out and NOT buy one of those!!
I hope any future releases are a little more grounded in the reality of the hobby
The atmosphere here holds between 40 and 50 percent less oxygen than at sea level. Extra oxygen is pumped into the unpressurized rail cars as they roll across the Tibetan plateau, but it's not clear that it does much good. All around me in the dining car, passengers were suffering the hangover-like symptoms of altitude sickness: throbbing headaches and severe nausea.
I was feeling relatively chipper due to Diamox, a prescription drug that prevents altitude sickness. Even so, I was lightheaded and a little dizzy. Back in my compartment, I plugged the oxygen hose into the wall and inhaled deeply. Almost instantly my mind cleared. But the effect lasted only as long as I breathed oxygen from the hose.
The surrealness was heightened by what looked like hundreds of enormous golf tees lining the tracks. They're an attempt to solve the railroad's most vexing problem.
Four hundred miles of the route lie atop a particularly unstable form of permafrost that thaws during the day and freezes at night, causing the tundra above it to rise and fall by inches. To try to prevent tracks from buckling and cracking, Chinese engineers elevated more than 100 miles of it and installed the giant golf tees along other stretches. These are cooling pipes that use solar energy to turn liquid ammonia into gas, chilling the ground and preventing the permafrost from melting.
Even casual passersby pause to admire this beautiful two-story brick and limestone depot built in 1876. Onetime headquarters for the Illinois Central's Northern Division, the 19-room structure featured passenger facilities on the first floor and housed division officials and staff on the upper level.
As times changed, division headquarters were moved elsewhere; passenger service ended in 1939, and the depot closed in 1967. Freight trains used the line into the 1980s. The tracks have since been removed.
As disuse led to disrepair, concerned citizens began efforts to save the historic station. It has been returned to life as the Amboy Depot Museum, filled with railroad memorabilia and local history items.
The telegrapher's office features a variety of telegraph keys, timetables and photos of train wrecks that occurred at Amboy. Original benches grace depot waiting rooms; there are original railroad documents, photos, railroad lanterns, switch keys and a great deal more.
A steam locomotive, a 1920s-era caboose and a century-old IC freight house on the grounds are open to tour.
Sitting at East Main and South East Avenue, the depot is open year-round, 1-4 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday and holidays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Admission is free.
Amboy is about 110 miles from downtown Chicago. For additional information, call 815-857-4700.
What do some servicemen stationed in Iraq do to pass the time? Hobbies! Specifically, model trains! Here, Lt. Patrick Anderson works with some of our HO scale hopper cars. Patrick and a few others in the outfit have also built an operating layout using KATO UNITRACK.And Kato has pictures of it here. (On the lefthand menu of the Web site of the Japanese model railroad manufacturer Kato USA, click on the Customer Photo Gallery and go to the Baghdad Hobby Club at the bottom of Page 2.)
