Wordless Wednesday: August 23rd 2017

Wordless Wednesday

Train show in Lynchburg, VA over the weekend

Got up very early on Saturday and drove down to a yearly train show I attend every year.  My oldest son, Cameron also went down with me.  It's a smaller show but always turns up so good bargains for me and I do sell a lot of my excess items.  While my selling was OK, I did pick up a 65' gondola, a book and a Bachmann 70 tonner painted in the attractive M&ET scheme.  I actually ran upon them on my honeymoon in 2004 while passing through Modesto, CA.  It was really neat to see 3 70 tonners moving a long string of reefers.

Very well done 70 tonner in M&ET paint

On the way home, I wanted to bypass the unfortunate craziness in Charlottesville and decided to go another way home and see the original Buckingham Branch and photograph the large chip mill they have. I also grabbed some shots of two other types of loaders they have in town.  These are both not in operation but would be neat to model.

This looks as if it was a hopper loader at one time.  Probably sand trucked in.

A closer view of the loading area

This loader was on the same spur as the possible sand loader.  Maybe aggregate?

Loading shoot

The dump end

A very old Y&S boxcar rusts away

The original BB's largest customer and probably newest one: Rock Tenn wood yard.

These Westvaco wood chip hoppers are ready to be loaded.

One full hopper!

This is a massive operation.  Look at all the logs stacked in the distance.  That's only about fifth of them.

Our final stop was in the town of Orange to see if we could catch a train.  No luck on the train, but a great display on the railroad history of the town.

Lots of railroad history here in Orange, VA.  Orange is the terminus of my Virginia Midland model railroad.

This was a scary wreck back in 1965.

Some of those towns sound familiar!  This is the station list from Fredericksburg to Orange.

County map of Orange

Some more history on the Virginia Central

The wreck of the Fat Nancy Trestle just south of town

The Virginia Central rail bus.  It also had a trailer it towed.

Out with the old, in with the new!

Well, after almost 17 years of service it was finally time for an upgrade.  I'm talking about my airbrush compressor and it has a story to it.  I have been wanting to put sound in a smaller locomotive for a while now.  I finally won a Bachmann 70 tonner on Ebay last week.  While looking for a Micro Tsunami 1 for a Cummins GE (very hard to find and not available in Tsunami 2 yet) in a search, I found that Micromark sells them and had a few in stock,  Didn't know that!  So it was on sale and started looking through the MicroMark catalog for other things I might need.  They have a decent air compressor on sale and by chance NMRA member now receive a 15% off at MicroMark.  So the compressor was on sale already and an extra 15% off.  Not bad at all!

My old Paasche compressor.  Very loud and old.  Paid $50 used for it at the now gone RIP Track in Dale City, VA.

My new compressor.  Very quiet with adjustable PSI and a on/off button.

Drawerzilla and other projects

I finally completed the freight car drawers or as I call it Drawerzilla.  This was a major undertaking as it turned out bigger than  I planned.  I finally put the finishing touches on it Saturday and brought it in the house.  Between wood and redoing my deck last week, I bet I went to my local Home Depot everyday last week.  I still need to paint it and get another drawer liner and dividers for the last drawer.  I decided to put wheels on it to be able to move this behemoth.

Here is my 6 drawers of freight cars.

Holds 3 50' cars across, with space to spare.

The dividers are wood.  Not Ideal but made installation easy.

Tank car storage.  These were the hardest to store in my opinion.  Too many fragile pieces compared to a boxcar.

The last drawer need to be completed

The drawer liner keeps cars from rolling and moving.

Finally got the chevron stripes on the VC #107 now to add the grabs and weather.

Did a custom Southern woodchip hopper based on a prototype.

In between working on Drawerzilla, I worked on these two locos.  I wasn't going to add the VM logo to the C430, but man does it look great!  RS11 #204 is a Norfolk, Franklin and Danville prototype loco.

And my birthday present to myself, a SD40F "Red Barn"  I'm currently working on Econami Sound install.