Finished U.S.M.R.R. Passenger Coach

You may remember the difficulty I had repainting the Bachmann Old Timer coaches to wear the livery of U.S.M.R.R. passenger cars. It's been about two months since then. Frankly, I forgot to include the results in any blog post since then. So, here it is.

You'll see the color is now completely different than I had intended. The tan color wasn't going to work with the black lettering from Microscale. As much as I wanted to make this work to look like all the historical images of U.S.M.R.R. coaches, with light lettering on a dark background, it's better to make them look good with the options available.

After carefully stripping the car—I already ruined two of them using chemicals that were too harsh for the plastic—and scraping down the factory lettering, I began the primer coats of sunflower yellow by Testors. I almost exclusively use flat, since gloss looks too toy-like at this scale.

Once the body of the car was painted and dry, I masked off the roof and fascia just above the lettering board. Flat black was applied to the roof and grab irons.

The final touch was the decal work. Those suckers along the roof were long. Thankfully I was used to working with the decals at this point, or it would've been a disaster.

Maybe I got overzealous with the decals, but I think the number-over-shield in the center of the coach body looks really sharp. There are two small numbers on both end doors.

Overall, I'm very pleased with how the coach turned out. It was easily the most involved painting project I've done so far and I'm not sure if or when I'll have time to do the other coaches.

Other Odds n Ends

You can also see how I've added real dirt, gone over with a strong magnet, to the trackbed. It's only installed near the depot.

In the background you'll also see those Sibley tents I got on eBay. They're not painted yet, but from this distance and being out-of-focus, they look very nice.

And in the far background, you may notice it's different. That's because we had to move the table into the other side of the basement. The corner this was previously in was where we'd get some water during bad stretches of drenching rain. It was such a pain to move the table, I decided to get it up to dry ground. It also forced me to clean up the basement this weekend, so it worked out for everyone.

Till next time...

Introducing the B&O twins

Here are the latest additions to the roster: a pair of Atlas 4-4-0 Baltimore & Ohio No. 25's. Until I can reletter them, I'll refer to them as The Twins. The decoder addresses are Nos. 5 & 25, but you can't tell from just eyeballing it.

Doubling the size of my roster for a great price?
Yes, please!

Over at the Streamlined Backshop, they're running an inventory clearance sale on a bunch of stuff. So if you're looking to add to your stock, go check them out. I picked up these beauties for a fantastic price, and Steve was able to get the decoders installed super fast. Maybe someday I'll be adventurous and do these installations myself, but right now I'm in no position to ruin engines.

I'll have to figure out some ways other than just relettering or giving them nameplates on the boilers. I'm not going to disassemble, strip and paint either of them. My initial thoughts are using different color cowcatchers, smokestacks, and giving one of the cab roofs a coat of black. We'll see.

The best part is seeing them run together for the first time. One (I forget which at the moment) has a hitch going in reverse, but other than that, they're great.

DCC++ and an eBay score

eBay score

Finding N scale Civil War engines and rolling stock is difficult enough. Finding structures, especially the Micro-Trains Line laser kits, are downright impossible. Well, that's what I thought. Out of the blue I saw several Civil War era pieces for sale on eBay, including the MTL Civil War Era Loco Shed and, an awesome bonus, two packs of Sibley Tents!

Other items for sale that day were what looked to be 3D printed passenger cars, but I wasn't going to spend that kind of money to win those at the moment. What I definitely was going to do: win the shed and tents. They arrived and I couldn't be happier. I'm about 1/3 of the way through the shed, and I punched the tents and firewood out of the frames. I'll post an update on this when I'm done. Frankly, I don't know where I will fit the engine shed, as I didn't set up any kind of siding or yard to accommodate it. The Sibley Tents should fit nicely almost anywhere.

 

DCC++

About three months ago, I read about DCC++ and it piqued my interest. For about $50 I could make my own DCC system? Yes, please. I've been itching to get familiar with DCC so that in a few months, I can start actually building a new layout with DCC from the start. This would be an awesome way to get the ball rolling.

So I got to work on ordering supplies and carving out some time to work on it. The two best tutorials I found were by DIY & Digital Railroad and Cobo in HO.

After some false starts, I got the thing to power the Gen. Haupt. But the program track was makeshift and poorly connected. So I got to work building a nice program track that would offer stability and connectivity.

I used a piece of composite wood, some code 80 Atlas flex track, and two siding bumpers. But what I was really anxious about was soldering for the first time. Yes, I've never soldered before.

Fast forward about an hour. The tracks are cut to size, cleaned, and fitted with new rail joiners.

Things worked out well, even if the soldering job wasn't very aesthetic. I cleaned it up a little with a file after it was done. The wires ran through the board. The track caulked down tight. And the locomotives wouldn't run off the end of the earth. Testing out the DCC++ system was made much better using this later that day.

 

I get the engine running, but can't seem to read or do anything to the decoder. For three days, I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong. It has to be something, right? The engine runs ok, even if a little rough. But JMRI keeps giving me an error message: "No acknowledge from locomotive (308)"

Turns out the answer was right in front of me the whole time... the wires! I had them in the main and not the program. How stupid of me. Once I did that, restarted the locomotive entry in DecoderPro and hit the read button, holy moly it worked.

But there's another problem. The Haupt is running very poorly, considering how wonderful everyone says DCC can be for slow speeds. It starts out running at what appears to be in the 15mph zone, and when it does run, it has a  bad lurching gait to it. I'm hopeful that it's just a matter of adjusting the settings in the decoder, and not a bad engine.

Update: After consulting with decoder guru Steve Fields, I've made some adjustments to the CVs and, well, just look at how beautifully it runs!