An RS23, plus a Pair of Tangent Boxcars

On Wednesday, Brian Smith sent me this picture of the Ontario Southland's (OSR) #506 at the yard in St.Thomas, Ontario.  rrpicturearchives.com has it listed as an RS23, built in August 1959.  I like how flat it's black paint has become.

Thanks again Brian.

And, following up a bit on the Brian's photo of the HBIX SW1200 from last week, was Dave of the Consolidated Motive Power Services blog.  Dave had the presence of mind to check into the switcher's ownership a bit more, and found out that the grey box on the side of the # 9359 is a Hotstart system.

I wasn't too clear on just what that meant, so I typed "locomotive hotstart system" into the good old google search engine, and came up with the Hotstart website, explaining just what such a system is, and how it works.

So, here's Brian's photo again, and for those interested, it's followed by the link to the Hotstart website:

and the link: https://www.hotstart.com/solutions/diesel-driven-heaters/

A few weeks ago, I ordered and quite quickly received 2 of the new Tangent 86 foot Greenville auto parts boxcars.  These are really nice models - really nice -, but they certainly weren't inexpensive.  $64 USD each, plus shipping, and then converted into to Canadian dollars = Yikes!  At least Canada Customs didn't charge me anything more.

I got one of the Southern boxcars and one of the Conrail models.  My other auto parts cars are all Athearn and Walthers models of course, and many of them are blue (GTW, DT&I, L&N) so I chose to get a couple of brown painted cars to try to mix things up a bit.

Here's a look at my two newest 86 footers out on the GTW line...

I haven't done any weathering on either of these boxcars yet, but I hope I'll be able to get to  some of that soon.

Conrail Quality logo at upper left

The Southern car is my favourite of the two.