Leaser of the Month and a Little Ground Cover

Another locomotive from my fleet of leasers, is this Helm Leasing Dash-8 39 B.  I bought this (used) several years ago at Doug's Trains in London, Ontario.  I don't know who patched it over to HLCX, but it appears to have been originally painted for BC Rail.The light weathering, which appears to have all been done with an airbrush, caught my eye at the time. 

The locomotive suffered a near disastrous fall to the floor when I was moving my storage cabinet.  The door to the cabinet flung open unexpectedly and down it went, suffering some pretty significant damage.  Sean Steele fixed 'er up again though for me, putting the drive back together and replacing broken handrails. He even added the ditchlight jewels.

HLCX 3901 is seen here idling on JSSX tracks that run parallel to a local roadway.  The rails on this track uneven, something I did on purpose by placing styrene shims below the ties on one side when I laid the track. 

Helm Leasing 3901 awaiting it's next assignment outside of the JSSX locomotive shop.

I got a bit of scenicking done this week.  In front of my recently re-built industrial building I replaced about 5 feet or so of code 100 track with code 83.  With that much done, I ballasted the track and sprinkled the area with scenic material.

Each of these sets of tracks have different colours of ballast because they belong to two different railroads.  I'd like to scenic the brown coloured area in the foreground soon, but first I have some work in mind for the red brick structure and the light coloured building on the right.

And a somewhat similar view of the way the way the ground in this area looked a couple of weeks ago.