EBT #7 completed!

After nearly 20 months from when I first started thinking about this project, East Broad Top #7 is finally ready to roll onto the rails and provide service to the towns and industries along the Tuscarora Railroad.

The paint scheme I chose for this model comes from similar examples of EBT locos c. 1908. Recall from earlier posts that #7 was inside the EBT's paint shop when the building caught fire and burned to the ground. Number 7 was damaged in that fire, which is when it received its new steel cab. As a matter of course, it would have been repainted following the fire. The EBT had just ordered 2-6-2 #11 from Baldwin, wearing this particular paint scheme (Baldwin "olive green," a paint which by all accounts I've read is a very dark green that looks almost black) with orange lettering. They had also just rebuilt EBT #1 (their first locomotive, a diminutive 2-6-0) with what appears in photographs to be identical paint (or at least lettering) that same year. So in all likelihood, #7 would probably have been painted to match those two locos.

The green paint I use is Badger ModelFlex "Seaboard Airline Pullman Green." The boiler is Testors' Buffable "Gunmetal." This gives a nice, darkish, almost mirror-like finish, which I then enhanced by buffing in powdered graphite. The weathering dulls the finish down a bit, but in the bright sun, it still shines very nicely. The smokebox is flat black paint.

The firebox and frame was also painted flat black, then weathered with washes and weathering powders. The drivers were painted the same green as the cab, but also weathered with washes and powders.

The detailing in the cab is approximate at best, but based on prototype practice. It's more just to give the effect of there being pipes everywhere. I did add a small lantern hanging next to the wall to illuminate the cab at night. It's wired to the power, so when I turn the loco on, it (and the headlight) come on. In retrospect, I probably should have hung the lantern on the back wall so the crews aren't looking into a light, but there was no convenient place to run the wires since the wires have to come out of the boiler. The lantern is an Ozark Miniatures casting.

The lettering on the side of the tender is from a set of custom dry transfers I had made up ostensibly to do the lettering on Accucraft's (or Rich Yoder's) EBT mikados when I got around to repainting them to their "as built" appearance. Well, I've got #12 from Accucraft, but decided I wasn't in the mood to backdate it, so it kept its factory lettering. I don't have one of Rich's mikados--nor do I foresee myself getting one in the near future. So, I'm using the lettering for all my other EBT locos (#1, #3, and now #7). The only "problem" is that I didn't have any 3s or 7s made up on that sheet--just 12, 14, and 15--so I had to use O-scale decals for the 7s. Fortunately there's no number on the side of the cab (that practice didn't start until #12 was built in 1913) so the O scale numbers work well. I got them from the Friends of the East Broad Top, so the color matches.

You'll also notice that I decided against the side extensions on the tender (see earlier post). Once the loco was painted, the visual weight changed, and the tender looked much better without it. 

The coal is genuine EBT coal, collected years ago when I was exploring the mines back in Robertsdale. The EBT seems always to have burned "run-of-mine" coal in their locos, despite having the facilities to clean and grade the coal up at Mt. Union. As such, the coal in the tenders always seems to have ranged in size from dust to fairly sizable chunks. That's great for modeling, because it means all I gotta do is get a big lump of coal and a big hammer. Before too long, I've got a perfect coal load. Pour it in, spray it with water laced with a touch of soap, then pour dilute white glue over it. The same technique was used on the "spillage" in the back of the tender, though I used just the smaller bits for that.

I wanted to model #7 as a hard-working locomotive; maybe not quite so "spit-and-polish" as her sisters (though they're hardly "museum fresh" either.) So, there's lots of dirt and grime, but more soot spread over the top of the boiler, domes, and cab roof than the others. I used flat black acrylic paint (Folk-Art or similar), then dusted coal dust onto it while wet. It sticks very well to the paint, resulting in pools of cinders here and there. A little extra dusting with powders completes the look. From a purely "scale" perspective, the dust is probably about twice as coarse as it would otherwise be, but from normal viewing distances, makes for a better effect. If it were smaller, it would just look like dust, not cinders.

All in all, I'm very pleased with how this project turned out. Of course, I get it done just in time for Bachmann to release a 1:20.3 C-19 which would have saved me a fair amount of work, but in looking at that model, I'd still have to do a bit, so maybe not such a savings after all. This loco runs very smoothly, so there's nothing more in terms of performance I'd desire from it. I can definitely see it being a "go-to" locomotive on the TRR. Still gotta work out some bugs with the front pilot truck, though. It's still prone to derailing every now and then.

East Broad Top #7 Progress Report

Okay, it's been a while, and I've been a bit distracted by a few other projects. Hey, I deal with enough deadlines at work. If I wanna shelve a project on the railroad for a year, I can do that, right? (Okay, I still haven't finished my passenger cars yet, and it's been nearly 5 years for one of them...)

Anyway, after a month or so of finally getting around to working on it, EBT #7 is ready for the paint shop.

Truth be told, I'm not so much the type of modeler who has to have many projects going at once as much as I am a modeler who hits a minor snag on one project and decides to shift gears until inspiration strikes. And often, it's not clear what that particular snag is until inspiration strikes and you want to get back at it. In the case of #7, it was the front pilot.

EBT #7 always had a wood cowcatcher, even through its service on the Ohio River & Western. Nothing unusual about that. I've scratchbuilt them before. They're not difficult. You draw it on the computer, print out the patterns, cut to shape, and glue together. It's not hard--just tedious. And I knew I'd have to do that for this loco since there wasn't a commercial laser-cut pilot which would work and save me the toil. As it happens, I went into Caboose Hobbies around a month ago, and they had just put out a bunch of large scale detail parts on the clearance self. Pennies-on-the-dollar prices on these things. Included in that was a Precision Scale 1:24 K-27 cowcatcher. As you see above, it's a casting of a "boiler pipe" cowcatcher. But for whatever reason, this kicked something into gear for me. At the very least, it would be something to visually give me the appearance of a proper cowcatcher on the loco while I got going again on the rest of it. So it (and a bunch of other detail parts) came home with me. After some minor cutting to clear the coupler pocket, I attached it to the pilot beam, and I liked it. The front of the loco looked "finished." I may still build a proper wood pilot for this loco (it's only 4 screws to remove it), but for now it will do.

The coupler pocket was built using the stock Accucraft 1:32 coupler box with some extra styrene bits glued in place. Nothin' fancy. The coupler lift bar is .035" mig welding wire that I got from Harbor Freight--something like $5 for a spool of a gazillion feet that I'll never empty in the next 30 years. It's got a good degree of stiffness to it, but is still a bit more pliable and easy to work with than the steel "music wire" you find at hobby shops.

The headlight is a stock Bachmann headlight that I backdated with some plumber's putty. The headlight bracket is from a Bachmann 2-6-0. The smoke stack was turned from PCV pipe fittings.

The smokebox front is a press fit inside the PVC pipe I used for the boiler. The core of the plug is 2" outside-diameter acrylic tube, wrapped in electrical tape to bring it to a snug fit inside the PVC pipe.

To lay out the bolts and dogs and other fittings on the front, I printed out this circle and attached it to the styrene sheet to cut out.

I would highly recommend anyone wanting to build models of things that are riveted to get one of these things. It's a punch and die set from Micro Mark. If I read correctly, they're discontinuing this version, and supposedly replacing it with something else, or I'd post a link. Northwest ShortLine makes a similar thing, but will cost you considerably more. Regardless, it's indispensable when it comes to doing long rows of evenly-spaced rivets.

Of course, in large scale, counting the rivets is easy. Getting them the right size and shape is the challenge. This is the side sheet for the firebox, whose stay bolts have a unique dimpled shape. I embossed the rivets using the punch set, then went back with a scratch awl and "popped" each one.

Here's the finished sheet on the boiler.

Here's the firebox on D&RGW #346 at the Colorado RR Museum, which was built to the same drawings as EBT #7. (And proved to be a great resource for building this model.)

The backhead and cab floor are built similar to how I did the smokebox front--it just plugs into the PCV pipe for the boiler.

Plumbing this locomotive was an educational experience. While #346 may have been built to the same Baldwin drawings as EBT #7, that's largely where the similarities ended. Each railroad had different requirements, and adapted the locos over time differently. As such, much of the plumbing varied from loco to loco. One thing that was constant, however, was the throttle valve, and the "tube" that ran from the throttle in the cab to the steam dome. This is often overlooked in photographs, and sometimes forgotten on commercial models as well. (Of course, I figured this out after I had run the original lines for the steam to the injector, so that had to be redone.)

You can see also in this shot the construction of the cab, built from a core of .100" styrene, laminated with .010" styrene embossed with the rivets. The rounded edging on the roof is half-round strip from Evergreen. The "doors" on the front of the cab are cosmetic; the seams just scribed into the styrene sheet to make a visible line. They won't open.

Detailing the firebox and ashpan was fun. Clear photos of this end of the loco are non-existant, so I had to do a lot of guessing in terms of how the brake rigging would have been attached. I could see the Eames vacuum cylinders (the round things) in the photos, but much else was in shadow. Here, again, is where having #346 nearby came in handy. The ashpan and firebox mounting links (the bike-chain-looking things) are patterned after what's on that loco.

The tender shell is designed to lift off the base for easy access to the control electronics and battery. This arrangement, too, might change depending on which control system I ultimately end up using. The new QSI Titan has some features I'd like to try in this loco, but I'm waiting for them to upgrade the software for the steam locos to take advantage of those features. If I do go that route, I'll put all the electronics in the boiler and just the batteries and speaker in the tender. I'll run two separate batteries, because the Titan has a synchronized chuff feature that will drive a smoke unit. I'd love to see this thing puffing smoke, if only for show for 10 minutes or so before I get bored and turn it off. You can see the construction of the tender tank--similar to the cab with a core of .100" styrene laminated with thinner sheets.

To laminate the sheets, I'm using 2-sided tape. I could use styrene solvent cement, but I can never get it down to more than just the edges of the sheet, and depending on the thickness of the sheet, sometimes you get some crazing in the middle if you use a thicker cement. This stuff is permanent. You roll it on, then peel off the orange backing to reveal the "sticky" side. Line up your sheet and press. Line it up well, as you may not get a second chance. I get it at Michaels or similar craft store. They have it in varying widths as well as full sheets.

The steps on the tender are Ozark Miniatures castings. If you look closely, you'll see a pinhead in between the cast-on bolt detail. These steps don't have any physical means of being attached to the tender, and as I've experienced on other locos where I've used these steps, there's no glue strong enough to hold them in place when the loco hits a rock or some other obstruction. So the pin is necessary to hold the step onto the tender. When painted, it will blend in.

The rear coupler is the same Accucraft 1:32 coupler as on the front, only on this one, I cut away part of the coupler box so I could fit the top of a 1:20.3 Accucraft coupler box over it. (I'm using the 1:32 couplers because they scale out to the 3/4-sized coupler used by the EBT and other narrow gauge lines, particularly those in the northeast and midwest. The grab irons and bolts on the tender are from Phil's Narrow Gauge. Cheap, strong, and pre-bent--three qualities I like in grab irons.

I modeled side extensions on the tender of this loco, which--to the best of my knowledge--the EBT didn't use. Most of their locos had a board going across the back of the tender just forward of the water hatch, but not along the side. The EBT was a short coal-hauling railroad, never far from a source of coal. There was no need to really extend the capacity of the tender. I added them strictly for aesthetic purposes. The tender is accurate for the original tender that went behind this loco. When the loco was damaged in the paint shop fire (see earlier post on #7), the railroad ordered a new steel cab from Baldwin. This was a lot taller than the original wood cab. No photos exist of #7 on the EBT prior to being sold to the OR&W in 1913, and the earliest photo of the loco on that railroad show it with a new, taller tender--presumed to have been built by the Pennsylvania RR who owned the OR&W at that point. In all the photos of the loco with the steel cab, I'm used to seeing a tender of a given height behind the loco. Without the side extensions, the original tender just looks short, mis-matched for the locomotive. Yeah, it's modeler's license. I'm okay with that. 

From here, it's off to the paint shop. Hopefully the weather will stay warm for the next month or so in order for me to get that done before winter sets in.

A New Depot at Blacklog

Historically, the town of Blacklog on the EBT's Shade Gap Branch was served by a simple passenger shelter. Located only one mile east of the EBT's main shops at Rockhill Furnace/Orbisonia, there was no need for anything larger. So, a physical depot at Blacklog is very much an invention of mine. But being the western end of the Tuscarora Railroad's operation (because I don't have the room on the railroad for a proper model of Rockhill Furnace), and I wanted a station of some kind sitting in the loop in the yard for visual interest, Blacklog's little passenger shelter was fed, watered, and grew into something much larger.

My first inclination was to have something of a large "signature" station there, since it's what you primarily see when you look out of the windows in the family room. Something large with a lot of presence that grabbed your attention. So I found plans for the EBT's Shirleysburg station and built a mirror image of that depot.

This is the original Blacklog depot. It's scratchbuilt using Precision Products veneer sheets over a product called "Fiberock." It's a tile underlayment for ceramic tile. I chose this product because it was purportedly waterproof, and cut very easily with a band saw. And to back that up, I had the basic "shell" of the station--without siding--sitting out in the elements for two years before I finally got around to finishing the station. Over those two years, which included our normal Summer gully-washer rain storms, constant watering of the garden, and being buried under snow in the winter, the material held up remarkably well. I figured I had a "winner" in terms of a robust material from which I could easily build structures for the railroad.

Well, I wouldn't be writing this if that were true. Two springs ago, I was prepping the railroad for the spring and I noticed this:

The freight room door had fallen inside. "No problem," thought I. It must have just gotten knocked in over the winter. I'll just glue it back in place. Alas, further investigation revealed the wall around the door had disintegrated. It had no structural strength. A quick tapping of the other walls revealed that this problem was spreading. But since it was still standing for the moment, I let it go, figuring I'd fix it "later."

By the Fall of 2011, the only thing holding the station up was the veneer sheet. The walls had lost all structural integrity. It had to go. One stiff wind and it would have toppled. So, out it came, leaving a bare spot in the yard. The goal was to pull away what was left of the Fiberock board over the course of the winter, then purchase new 1/2" bluefoam insulation board, rebuild the depot's frame, then re-hang the veneer sheet over that.

That was the plan.

Well, you know what they say about plans. (Actually, they say a lot of things about plans, so pick one about things not going according to them.)

I got busy over the winter and spring with other projects for the railroad, and this box of clapboard siding "skin" sat in a box in my workshop looking plaintively up at me every time I walked in there. I also had this bare spot on the railroad where the depot once stood--made even more derelict by the old wood platform between the two tracks falling apart with each passing rain. Something had to be done.

A while back, a friend of my dad's had given him surplus Pola "Silverton" station. It was semi-assembled, but in enough pieces to be put in a box. For those not familiar with it, here's a photo of an identical station painted and serving the good folks of Woodland Junction on my dad's Woodland Railway:

(Thanks to Ken Brunt for the photo--saves me the trouble of digging through my files for one.) 
 Now, generally speaking, I'm not a big fan of using plastic building kits because they're so ubiquitous on everyones railroads. And by and large, many of the Pola kits are really too small to look "proper" on a 1:20.3 railroad. The doors scale out a bit low, etc. and so forth. However, their use on the TRR was not unprecedented. The depot at Neelyton is also a similar Pola station kit that I picked up at a swap meet. While diminutive, the architectural features scale out well. So on a recent trip back east, I decided to bring that surplus station back with me to see how I could adapt it, at least temporarily until time allowed me to rebuild the "real" Blacklog depot.

 

Here's the depot temporarily held together with Scotch tape, set in the footprint of the original Blacklog depot. If you're particularly architecturally astute, you'll notice one difference between this and the station on my dad's railroad... There's no gable end over the bay window. On the flight back to Denver, I was leafing through a book on the Newport & Sherman's Valley Railway, which was a 3' gauge railroad that ran two or three valleys east of the East Broad Top and Tuscarora Valley Railroads. In looking at the architecture of their stations, they were very similar to what the Pola kits portray save for simple roof lines. "Cool," thought I. When I set things up, I reversed the roof panels and liked the look of the simple roof on the depot. Then, as luck would have it, the roof of the freight half of the original Blacklog depot was a perfect fit! Sold!

So, I took the parts and pieces down to the workshop, cleaned and painted them, then printed new signage on vinyl adhesive sheet. I added a train order signal and interior lights, and Blacklog now has a new depot:

The one thing that struck me curious about this particular kit was that the door to the "freight" part of the depot was on the end, and the puny excuse for a freight platform Pola supplies with the kit was barely wider than the door. If I were a freight agent, I'd get awful tired of unloading box cars onto the platform then trudging the freight back up to the door. So a proper freight platform had to be built. It's built from Precision Products veneer sheet, and the core is solid block of 2" blue foam insulation. I thought about wrapping it around the front of the station, but it got in the way of the bay window, so I scrapped that idea. Figured it was probably stupid to have a freight platform butting up against a window at foot level. 

Milk was historically an important commodity carried on the Tuscarora Valley Railroad, with the Breyer's creamery at its northern end. As such, you'd always find milk canisters sitting on the freight platforms ready to be transported one way or the other. Since the TRR connects with the TVRR, it makes sense to find milk canisters sitting around waiting to head that direction. Other crates and barrels are resin castings I've picked up here and there, painted with acrylic paint. There's a little bit of forced perspective in play here. I mentioned the doors scaling out well in 1:20.3; well, the doors on the front scale out well--6' 8" x 30"--the same as a standard door today. The freight doors, curiously, scale out at only 6' tall. Not unheard of for the height of a door in a c. 1880s structure, but I'd expect a freight door to be just a bit taller. (Then again, the doors on the box cars weren't, so the guys moving the freight would certainly be used to watching their heads.) Still, I found some "slightly smaller" figures to set in front of the door, giving it the illusion that it might be a bit taller than it really is. Both of these figures scale out to around 5' in 1:20.3. Certainly very reasonable heights, but placed strategically to make the door look taller than it really is.

On the other end of the platform, good ole' Slim and his chickens wait for the train to show up. Slim is from a line of figures sold by Fun and Games. I picked him up at a convention a while back, and he's finally found his place. The chickens are from Bachmann (as are the milk canisters mentioned earlier). Seriously, when you're modeling an agricultural line, you can't have too many chickens and milk canisters. 

So, Blacklog now has a proper depot once again. At this point, it's "here to stay." I like how it turned out and how it fits in the scene, so my desire to rebuild the old one is pretty much vaporized. Besides, from a practical standpoint, a depot so close to Rockhill Furnace and the dedicated freight depot there would not have had such a large freight section of its own anyway. A small room with a platform would be adequate. I've salvaged what I could from the original depot, and those parts will find their way into future buildings. I will at least rebuild the mid-siding platform. I'll do that over the winter. Well, that's the plan...

Tuscarora Railroad #4

Okay, I try not to be the kind of model train guy who buys something just because he likes it. Yes, that's a perfectly legitimate reason to buy something and I know plenty of folks who have good collections of stuff they like for precisely that reason. And therein lies the conundrum. That's a dangerous road for me to go down because there's some really cool stuff out there that I can see myself liking. I really do try to limit my purchases and acquisitions to models of prototypes that ran on the East Broad Top or Tuscarora Valley railroads. It makes it a whole lot safer to walk into the hobby shop, knowing I can appreciate the models on the shelves, but not have to bring them home.

The problem is, there's this one locomotive, see... and I've always kinda liked it, see... but I can appreciate when I see others running it, right? I can look at it in the case at the hobby shop and admire it. I don't need to own it... right?        RIGHT???????

Here's the story... A while back, Accucraft comes out with this really neat looking mogul. It catches my eye because it looks a lot like Tuscarora RR #2, which I built from a Bachmann 2-6-0. I think to myself, "wouldn't it be neat to have a live steam version?" But two things keep me from doing anything. First, at that point, I was concentrating my energy on building models of specific EBT locomotives, so another TRR locomotive didn't really fit my plans. More to the point, I had already ordered Accucraft's EBT mikado, so another live steamer wasn't in the budget (and I prefer not to sleep on the couch). So, it gets filed into the "someday, perhaps..." file.

Then, in my quest to build more EBT locos, my mind goes back to this mogul, and ponders whether it would be possible to convert it to a model of one of the EBT's larger moguls. A-ha, now I can "justify" buying the loco (someday) because it's going to become an EBT mogul. Yet at this point, I'm still waiting for Accucraft to deliver my EBT mikado, so it gets filed back into the "someday, perhaps..." file.

Fast forward to last Fall, when the planets aligned and my long-awaited EBT mikado showed up. All of a sudden, my dormant interest in live steam sees a new fire. I find myself out at the track at the Colorado RR Museum almost weekly, breathing the butane fumes and burning my fingertips. I unearth the cobweb-ridden steamers sitting idly on my shelves, bringing them back into operation. Then, I walk through Caboose Hobbies, and that Accucraft mogul that had been sitting in the glass case not catching too much of my attention all of a sudden drew me like a moth to a flame. Thoughts of a live steam EBT #5 began to bubble up once again.

I decided to put one of my older live steamers (a Roundhouse 0-4-0 rebuild) on the block. I hadn't run it but maybe once or twice since I moved out to Colorado, so I figured if I could give it a new home where someone would run it, I could use that money towards something I might be able to run. As luck would have it, a fellow steamer in Florida had an Accucraft mogul which he felt could likewise use a good home, so a deal was quickly struck.

This is what arrived--a demonstratively well-used, well-cared-for Accucraft mogul that had been somewhat customized with a wood cab and new stack. A test run a few days later (boy was that a hard wait), proved it to be a solid performer.

So, what to do with it. I immediately went to my idea of converting it to EBT #5. Alas, there were a few problems, not the least of which being the larger drivers needed would not fit, but also the boiler was simply too small, and it wouldn't have looked right regardless. So, back to my idea of a live steam version of TRR #2, which would have been nice since I had just scrapped my original TRR #2 for parts to build EBT #7 (which is still being worked on. I'll update that shortly.) Well, this loco is just enough smaller than my "post-wreck" TRR #2 to where I couldn't tell the tale that they were in fact the same locomotive. So, with those two options off the table, and neither the EBT nor the TVRR having a similar locomotive, the notion of Tuscarora Railroad #4 came to life. After about a month in the shop, here's what emerged:

Around 1913, traffic on the Tuscarora Railroad was flowing rather well. TRR #3 was handling most of the freight duties, while TRR #2 carried the passengers. That left TRR #1, a diminutive 2-4-2 set out as spare for when the other locos went in for servicing. The EBT had just sold locos #1 and #3 to the Tuscarora Valley Railroad, so--while technically still available for back-up duty--they were now playing back-up to the TVRR's locos instead. Also, the EBT had just sold #7 (also a regular on the Shade Gap branch of the TRR) to the Ohio River & Western. With fewer locos to "borrow" in times of need, the TRR looked for something used that they could get fairly inexpensively. They purchased a Baldwin mogul (c/n 4562, built 1879) originally built for the Utah & Northern Railway from a used loco dealer. Once in Pennsylvania, they dubbed the locomotive #4, and it set out for a long career far from its original stomping grounds.

(Real history insert--this loco was sold by the Sugarman Iron & Metal Co. in 1913, not to the TRR, but to the Nevada Short Line Railroad, where it became their #1. That loco is now preserved at the California State Railway Museum, and is the prototype for Accucraft's model.)

"Builders Photos"

In terms of significant physical changes to this locomotive, there are surprisingly few, and none that I did. The previous owner took the liberty of replacing the metal cab with a wood cab from Bronson-Tate, and replaced the original diamond stack with a straight stack from an Accucraft C-19, complete with spark arrestor. I discovered when I steamed it up that the spark arrestor was causing performance issues, so I took it off. Looks better without it, in my opinion.

I was on the fence as to what color I should paint it. At this point in history, the "typical" TRR paint scheme consisted of stained wood cab, plannished iron boiler jacket, and black paint with gold trim on the tender, frame, and domes. The wood cab had been painted, and I wasn't sure I'd be as sucessful as I'd want to be in stripping off the paint to be able to stain it. (Yeah, I could buy a new cab, but where's the fun in that?) So, the shop crews took a page out of the EBT's playbook, and went with a dark olive green on the cab, tender, and domes, aluminum (silver) trim, and a plannished iron boiler jacket. Anything had to be better than that uber-glossy black on the original model.

For the lettering, the shop crews took inspiration from the Pacific Coast Railway, which they also visited while out used-loco shopping. They liked the simplicity, and having the railroad name on the side of the cab instead of the tender harkened back to the old-time practice of naming locomotives. Not entirely by coincidence, the EBT had a locomotive named "Tuscarora," though by this time it no longer wore that name. The crews thought this a nice homage.

Accucraft did a good job with this model, and there was nothing really "out of place" that I felt needed to be changed. That's not to say I didn't do some minor tweaking here and there, adding some finer detail than what Accucraft put on the model. I'll start at the front, where the headlight got a proper reflector installed. This came from a Bachmann headlight I had in the scrapbox. Because the light sticks out so far from the boiler on this one, and wires running to it would be very obvious, I decided not to add a working light to this loco. Besides, it being live steam, I'd typically run it only in the daytime, when crews would not necessarily have an oil-burning headlight lit anyway.

The number plate is made from a tie pin I bought from the Friends of the East Broad Top's Company Store. I drilled out the center and just screwed it onto the stud that held the original number plate. (It's a soft metal, but seems (so far) to hold up well enough to the heat.) I also added proper lubricator lines to the steam chest.

The front pilot is the one that came with the locomotive, but I narrowed it by about 3/4" and lowered the coupler pocket so the coupler sat at the right height. Side steps and lift bar brackets are Trackside Detail castings. Had I known they were that short, I would have built some myself, but I'll wait for these to get bent and banged up beyond recognition before swapping them out. The coupler is an Accucraft 1:32 scale coupler, which measures just right for a 3/4-sized coupler used on a number of narrow gauge lines, including the EBT and TVRR.

This is a steam locomotive, and it does get oily--and this loco gets very oily during a run. (I'll have to consider putting a restrictor or something in the lubricator, maybe.) But in my opinion, the oil adds to the effect of the weathering. It's really the kind of effect you can't get any other way.Of course, after today's run, the deck is a lot more oily. The weathering powders have pretty much been absorbed into the oil. Not much one can do about that. It's a steam engine, and steam engines get oily.

If you've ever ridden behind a coal-fired steam engine, you know about cinders. Likely you've gotten at least one in your eye (every steam fan has to do that--it's a rite of passage). Well, they collect on the top of locomotives, too, especially around the smokestack, and along other edges and hard-to-clean places. I tried an experiment with weathering this loco. Typically I'll stipple black paint along the top of the boiler to simulate the cinders and soot that accumulates. I took it a step further and sprinkled coal dust over the wet paint just to see how well it would stick. Son-of-a-gun, it sticks pretty darned nicely, thank you. I do use the thick acrylic paints for this, so it's got some body to it to adhere to the coal dust. (Yeah, I know it's missing a screw. It stripped out when I was re-attaching the headlight.

The boiler was "painted" to look like a plannished iron boiler jacket. Since I didn't want to disassemble everything to use my normal technique of painting it with a buffable spray paint, I tried the same technique I used on EBT #12, of rubbing powdered graphite onto the boiler, then sealing it with acrylic. The hitch in the giddy-up this time round was that the original finish on the boiler was so glossy and smooth that the graphite couldn't even take hold on the surface. I went in and scuffed the boiler with some fine steel wool, and also used a very small drop of acrylic paint spread around the boiler surface as a kind of carrier for the graphite. this took a bit of practice to get right, but the "mess ups" were easily cleaned with lots of water for a do-over. After a day, I went back and sealed everything with a clear acrylic (Future acrylic floor polish.) I just diluted it about 50:50 in water and brushed it on with a broad (1") artists' brush.

More coal dust, weathering powders and a bit of oil creeping out from under the cab. For the coal dust on the running boards, I brushed white glue along the interior edge against the border, and sprinkled the dust in place. Also, you can see the effects of the acrylic wash I use for weathering. I brush this mixture (a random blend of brown and black paint mixed with lots of water) over the boiler and whatever it is I want to weather. If I want it to look dirty, I leave it as is. If I want it to look cleaner, but with some dirt in the cracks and crevasses, I wipe it off with a paper towel. It's hard to see in the photos, but I sanded the tops of the brass running boards to give them some slight wood grain. I thought about replacing them with wood, but figured this was good enough and it had the advantage of having a great deal of strength.

As the loco came from Accucraft, it had brake shoes on each of the three drivers. I don't know if this was prototypical or not, but it made the loco difficult to carry. Also, it left this great empty void between the two drivers, and I could not figure out any logical way any kind of air brake mechanism could have been attached to the brake rigging as modeled on the original. So I grabbed the brake rigging off of my now-scrapped "old" TRR #2, and JB-Welded it in place. It now matches photos of similar 2-6-0s of that era.

I have yet to figure out what Accucraft thinks is the need for an oil drain that sticks down 1" from the bottom of the cab, but it sure can be unsightly. This air tank was originally on the other side of the cab. I removed it, cut an opening in the middle to hide the lubricator drain, and screwed it in place on this side of the locomotive. Now the lubricator drain is much better hidden, and almost looks like it could be quasi-prototypical. The cab step is taken from the Bachmann 2-6-0 that was "old" TRR #2. Between this loco and EBT #7, there's not a whole lot of that loco left.

I love the Bronson-Tate wood cab on this loco; it's got lots of detail that really sets it out. Unfortunately, it also had the window pillar centered in the cab, right in line with the lubricator cap. Even without glazing in the windows, it was still a bugger to get the cap off. I can't abide locomotives without glazing in the windows, so something had to give. I moved the pillar up to 1/3 from the front of the cab, which gives me just that much more room to reach in to unscrew the cap. Despite its prominence in the photo, it's really not all that obvious when you see it running on the railroad. I also didn't bother "dirtying up" the pressure gauge on this loco. For whatever reason, it doesn't stick out quite as much as the one in EBT #12 does, at least to my eyes. That may change, and it's certainly easy enough to fix.

The lettering is a water-slide decal I did on my Alps printer, while the striping is vinyl tape that I cut to the proper width. I actually hate decals, but I've discovered that if they don't want to seat properly, you can carefully poke some holes and brush dilute clear acrylic (Future) over the decal and the acrylic will get between the decal and the surface, creating a solid bond.

The roof was originally smooth, so I covered it with rectangles of aluminum duct tape to simulate a soldered tin roof. This was then painted a dark grey and dusted with coal dust while the paint was still slightly damp. I rubbed this into the paint with my fingers to get the finish. It's since been coated with a nice layer of oil, which over time will get dusty and dirty; this cab roof will only get better-looking with time.

If there was one thing that really bothered me about the tender, it was the width of the floor. It stuck out from the side of the tank by around 3/16"! That really made the tender look toy-like to my eyes. So that was pretty much the first thing that got changed (even before I ran it for the first time!) I made a new floor out of styrene, sanded in some wood grain (60-grit sandpaper is your friend), and scribed some individual planks into the top. Sure looks better than the flat brass plate they had originally. I also removed the ginormous air tank that was on the tender. In 1913, the EBT (who leases their rolling stock to the TRR) hadn't added air brakes yet, so there's no need for the TRR locos to have larger tanks--they just need enough for the locomotive.

Originally, the Accucraft tender came with a water-tight bath in the middle of the tender for a tender-mounted butane tank, though they actually put the tank in the cab instead. Since I get around 35 minutes on each tank, and the cab keeps the tank plenty warm, there was no need to move the butane tank back to the tender, so I decided that I'd just use that space for the R/C gear, and model something I rarely have a chance to--a half-full tender. The tool boxes are resin castings I picked up a while back at the hobby shop, the shovel is from one of Bachmann's locos. The bunker extensions are basswood.

The R/C gear sits in a drawer under the coal load. There's not much in there--just the receiver and a 4-AAA battery clip. The two sockets for the servos are along the bottom, barely visible under the coal (look under the power switch).

Slide the drawer in, replace the fireman (held in place by a pin in his foot that goes through the floor), and no one's the wiser that there are electronics in the tender. The engineer and fireman come from Scale Humans. I'm okay with painting figures, but I'm not very good at sculpting them.

While I'm on the subject of R/C, here's the servo that controls the Johnson bar. It's mounted on a small block of oak that's screwed to the floor of the cab. The zip tie runs through the block and helps keep things stable to the top.

The throttle servo is mounted on an oak block that's clamped to the throttle itself. This arrangement gives me around 120 degrees of throw on the throttle, which is quite ample for this locomotive. The servo is held in place with a metal clamp that goes over the top (not shown in the photo).

Tenders are often catch-alls for whatever is needed to keep the locomotive running, so I have no trouble throwing some miscellaneous junk in the back of the tender. There's also more coal dust spread around the back and along the floor at the base of the tank.

I added safety chains to the trucks, and also new steps at the back of the tender. (From an Accucraft Ruby--at least I kept it in the family.) Curiously, Accucraft didn't model a row of rivets along the bottom edge of the tender. I haven't a clue as to why not. Honestly you don't really miss them, even from fairly close up.

The more I run this locomotive, the more I like it. It's "just the right size" for my railroad, and has proven very controllable even on my 2% grades. I can settle it down to a nice, sedate 15 mile-per-hour trot and it doesn't mind one bit. I had it running out at the Colorado Railroad Museum today, having it in steam for nearly 2 hours straight (with stops for fuel, water, and oil.) With the R/C, switching cars with this loco is every bit as easy as it is with my electric mice. All in all, I think the decision to add a locomotive to the TRR's roster has proven to be a very good one indeed.