Modutrak at TrainFest

I had a fun run to Milwaukee to hang out with my Modutrak friends. I came in straight from San Diego, so I was lent a variety of trains to run.

Jordan at Rapido Trains lent me their Turbo Liner. What a dream! It ran flawlessly for hours and looked beautiful doing it!

Mike Skibbe lent me a monster freight, the 4 IM F-Units pulled it no problem. It is nice having broad curves to glide around. At a reasonable speed this train took an hour to navigate the layout. Here you can see it passing between the CNW and MILW tunnels at Tunnel City, WI. I built these modules before the St. Louis RPM and drove them 2300 miles for the show!

I also got to run some Southern Alberta Rail units. These are Grant Eastman creations owned by Mike.

BC Rail Cars

I have been wanting to increase the volume of BC Rail cars in White Pine. I added a mix of brands this week to bulk up the fleet. These cars hauled copper anodes from the Flin Flon mine in Manitoba to the White Pine Refinery for refining into copper cathodes. I made sure the cars all had metal wheels, were weighted correctly, and were weathered before they hit the layout.

The Kaslo kits I built and painted:

Athearn:

PWRS:

PWRS WC car… this was an absolute mess from the factory. Underweight, and it had fingerprints in the factory paint… I’m still waiting for PWRS to fix this.

More MOW

Okay… I got on a bit of a kick. I ended up building not one, but two N Scale tie gangs. One will stay with me, and the other will head to a beautiful Afton Canyon layout.

Some pics of my progress:

Tie Cranes

Spikers

Spike Pullers

OTM Retriever

TRIPP

TR1 Tie Inserter

Ballast Regulator

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.

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.

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.

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.