Another Day in Print!

Some of you may have noticed my SD60F build in the newest issue of N Scale Railroading! I'm pretty proud of this article. I hope you enjoy it too!

Canadian Pacific Locos

Well, my locomotive reduction plan is behind schedule (when doesn't that happen). I have been working hard on a couple of Canadian Pacific units. Both have a slew of detail parts on them, from MbE to Sandro to things I had to make myself. I hope to get them outside for a natural light photo shoot tomorrow, but I figured I would share the progress:

CP 9007 is a Southern Alberta Rail SD40-2F kit. I mounted it on a Kato Mid-Pro SD40-2 chassis, mostly so i could get the ditch lights going. I modeled this one as it looks recently, the solid front door was replaced with one that had a window and the striping wasn't replaced afterwords.

I had fun weathering this one to match the prototype.

CP 3015 is a GP38AC, this one looks easy, but I had a bunch of time in relocating the headlights to the low short hood. The fibre optic tube just didn't want to fit in the already full nose. I also gave it the Canadian plows, sand hatches fixed the brake to be more accurate and weathered it to look more realistic.

I gave this one the small Pac-Man scheme. It was fun making the rear black stripes.

This is always one of my favorite views, looking down on the fans.

I hope to get these two up on eBay before the end of the long weekend. By then the Skally SD40M-2s should be close to done and I should have some progress made on my next fleet reduction engines (CN is next).

Wheel Dilemma

As I convert my small fleet of rolling stock to metal wheels, a few conversations with my friend HK got me wondering. I know modern freight cars have 36" wheels. No debate there. The issue I have is that the left and right hemispheres of my brain can't agree on the visual versus the actual. I'll explain:
I am using FVM wheels. Up till now I have been using 33" wheels because they look right to my eyes (right brain). HK measured the FVM wheels for me and at the wheel face both sets are accurate to the given dimension (33"=33" and 36"=36"), this works for my left brain. Where the odd debate comes in at is that wheel flanges in real life measure about 1" give or take. On a FVM 33" wheel, the flange diameter is 38", or roughly that on a prototypical 36" wheel. The diameter of the FVM 36" flange is over 41", or roughly appropriate for an N Scale 40" wheel. Now my left brain hurts.

I decided I needed to figure out a way to check to see which half of the brain was the crazy one, so I too some prototype photos and lined them up with some model photos. Here are the results:
Photo 1 (FVM 33" Wheel): The overall diameter of the wheel (including the flange) closely matches the overall diameter of a real 36" wheel. Because the flange isn't weathered (and never will be) this stands out as the visual key in the picture to me.

Photo 2 (FVM 36" Wheel): The wheel faces are spot on to each other, but the oversized flange on the FVM wheel makes the wheel look oversized. If I had matched the trucks exactly the real wheel would have looked even smaller, exacerbating the issue.

 I believe I know how I must move forward. I hope this didn't hurt your brain as much as it did mine...