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. 

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…