August 27th Post

Reading through the Little Rock Line blog where Allen has been busy weathering U33B's, I ran across his link to Thomas Klimoski's Georgia Northeastern blog.  Thomas's excellent layout is often posted on YouTube.  You'll find the link to the Georgia Northeastern blog in my Blogs of Interest side-bar.

Don't really get to see too many black boxcars.  Around here at least it seems any black cars are tank cars or a few carbon black cars for the local Cabot Carbon plant.  I never see any black boxcars, so this photo taken by Collin Reinhart in Altoona, Pa. a week ago today kind of caught my eye...

https://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=129991

This is an Evans Railcar 50 footer, and I guess we see it in the photo as being black, but I suppose that really it's mostly grey. Maybe it's faded to grey from black.  Notice the white portion at the end portions of the side sill. If you wanted to model it (I'd kind of like to), ExactRail makes or made the correct car, but not in this colour scheme, so repainting would be required. I'm not quite sure how to come up with the red placard for the sides.

And downstairs here on my railroad, I got the just tiniest bit accomplished when I found and added a set of Details West mu hoses to my CN/GTW SD40 #5931.

3 other projects in progress in the back

The mu hoses installed, but not yet painted

Uh-oh, now it's 4 projects in progress in the background...

Well, I got them painted...Flat Black for the hoses with Flat Aluminum at the tips. I meant to paint the electrical plug cover to the right of the step red, but forgot.  I'll get to it. At least it looks a little bit better.

This and That in August

Owing to such nice weather outside, there's still very little going on at the JSSX, so I thought I'd post up a few pictures from the files.  Some may be familiar from previous postings...

The weathering on this older Roundhouse model makes it appear to have been out on the rails for quite a long time

JSSX 5068 in for maintenance.  Can you find the JSSX lettering on it?

Another view of the JSSX Maintenance building.  The building itself is a Pikestuff kit, which I painted in grey to try to keep it as commonplace looking as I could

I like this recent view as the GTW's 5931 as it approaches the shadow of the overpass.  The boxcar on the right is one of only a couple of my freight cars that I didn't do the weathering on.  I don't remember who actually did the painting and weathering on that one, but I got it from my friend Luc some years ago.

CN SWeep

Looks a little bit too shiny at the trucks and fuel tank, especially when compared to switcher 1317 in the background.  

I'll close out this time with this picture of the 12 years old Algoterra. Taken last weekend as it passed under the BlueWater Bridges, it was heading out into Lake Huron on it's way to Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Actually, this ship has already come back past here on Friday, and is now in Nanticoke.

For those interested in ships, here's a link below to marinetraffic.com where you can find ship locations throughout the world

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-82.2/centery:42.8/zoom:10

August 13th (8/13)

For some reason I like to think that maybe it had been a dark and stormy night on August 13 (8/13), 1956...the night I was born. Yup, 66 years ago today.

I've read that Elvis Presley released his hit single Don't Be Cruel later that same day. His performance in this link attachment took place about 4 weeks later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N81IktPflsA

Anyway, since it's 8/13 today and this is supposed to be about model trains, I'll present a few looks at my engine 813 as it goes about some business on the JSSX...

813 on the ready track, all set to go

Coming around the curve to work the Front Industrial with 3 boxcars in tow

Here, along the Front Industrial track, 813 is paused to uncouple from the boxcars

The engine moves forward to pick up that single boxcar in the distance. Once coupled on, it will have to run around to the other end of the cars it brought along, and shove forward to spot them at the warehouse

I like this view of the engine as it shoves ahead beneath the overpass.  I'm not sure I've tried taking a picture at this particular location before this, but I think it's an interesting viewpoint

Another look beneath the overpass.  I think that this view however would benefit from some refinement of the camera's angle.  Something to work on for another time.

The GP38 has also picked up a covered hopper

And finally for today, 813 with the covered hopper and boxcar returning to the JSSX yard.

Conrail Boxcar CR 244129

The new header photo for the month of August is a nice view (well, I think so anyway) of GP38 #813 of the JSSX power fleet parked outside of the maintenance shop.  This one was originally numbered 815 honoring my sister's birthday, but this engine is my favourite and I got kind of selfish one day and decided to re-number it to 813 to represent my own birthday.  Sharron gets the former 813 renumbered to 815 now.

Last week I showed this same photo of my Tangent 8 door boxcar, along with my comment that it was way too clean looking...

It's not that clean any more...(and yes, it's the same car)

The prototype photo I used for this side had the two union promoting tags in the middle area of the boxcar.  I thought they were kind of a neat.

This photo is a bit blurry.  Sorry 'bout that.

And the other side...

The pieces of graffiti were done with Posca paint pens that I had heard about.  I bought a set online through Amazon

Not necessarily in sequence, but here's everything that I used to weather this one.

One more look at the boxcar, from more of a distance.