Monday, December 25, 2023

PNW Railfanning - Kalama

Living in Washington state has provided me some great railfanning opportunities. I figured a should share some with all of you!

Here are some shots from Kalama, WA. It has two massive ship loading grain elevators, a steel mill, and an NP steam engine on display. I have seen as many as 8 unit grain trains here at once, plus some great mainline action.






Wednesday, September 6, 2023

MOW Unit

I’ve been starting work on a Maintenance of Way gang. Besides being visually interesting, I can put them to work and take certain tracks out of service for tie replacement or ballast work.





Thursday, July 13, 2023

Rolling Stock

I’ve added a few pieces of rolling stock to the roster on White Pine. A scale test car I made by cutting down a Kato tender and building back up and a couple of custom painted FVM boxcars.

WC 870 has a scratch built frame and roof, with Archer rivet decals and a custom brake wheel stand. It is weighted to NMRA specs and I used a custom set of Circus City decals.


WC 20035 and 25014 are custom painted and decaled boxcars, matching prototype pics.



And one more FVM car that I just patched and weathered. This one I based loosely off of a photo I found, it’s not the correct car type, but the MILW paint job was close enough for me to work with.



Sunday, May 7, 2023

White Pine Roster

The new WC White Pine roster has been taking shape.
WC GP35 #2557
WC GP40 #3005

WC Radio Control Car #14. This was an experiment the WC tried for one man control on this remote branch. 
WC GP30 #700. I had the fortune of riding in the locomotive in Duluth, MN where it wears SOOcolors again. 


Wednesday, March 15, 2023

450 Ton Flat Cars

I bought a couple of NScaleKits.com 450T depressed center flatcars. The kits were a hot mess. I had to rebuild every bolster to the correct length. The decks were the wrong shape and had to be rebuilt. The details were poor castings, so I swapped in parts from other kits. I scratch built the loads from some prototype pics I found. I figured these were more visually appealing than the normal grey transformer loads. Finally I have something I like… 






Saturday, August 28, 2021

Massive Update

I know it has been a long time since I’ve posted here. For those still following, I’ll get you up to speed. I did sell the Skally Line to a friend locally and in early 2020 I started a new layout. It it based on the WC White Pine Sub in 1996. More news on that soon. Last week I took the new layout to a large FreemoN meet in Evanston, WY, where it became part of a large (100’ x 150’) FreemoN layout. Here are some highlights:
Utah Railway power visiting White Pine
Utah Railway power crossing my Afton Canyon module (Stephen Henderson photo)
White Pine in all its glory!
Joe Fehr switching the White Pine yard.
The layout, 1200’ of modules.
We rented the Evanston enginehouse  for this private event.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

A Long Overdue Progress Update

So much going on... I’ve finally been making some progress after a little hiatus. I added a dozen new 2 Bay Intermountain covered hoppers. The couplers are all body mounted, so all I had to do was weather them and they were ready for unit train service.
 I finished up my 1956 RPM project cars.
 I made some progress on my UB project cars.
 I’ve started 3D printing on my new Anycubic Photon.
 I finished a Clinchfield MOW boom car.
I hope I can keep this pace up for a couple more weeks. It feels good to be getting things done!