Can I Buy You A Beer?

Here's a little project I finished up recently. Greenway Models is a company that has produced a lot of custom painted Athearn models. I learned that they made a model for Cremo Brewery when I saw one at the New Britain Industrial Museum. One finally turned up and, even better, it was still in kit form. So I decided to upgrade it to my layout standards.

The sides are separate pieces, with a cutout above the door.  The roof and ends are molded as a single part, and snap into that location. So that needs to be addressed. I also wanted to replace the molded on parts, and conveniently the paint scheme doesn't have any lettering in those locations.

My initial approach was simply to shave them off. But I also needed to determine what I would use to kitbash it. Looking for a potential donor in my stash I decided to go with the Branchline reefer. I did some test fitting, and found it was nearly a perfect match in height and length for the sides. The sides were slightly thinner. 

It occurred to me that I could cut the sides just inside the ladder and grab irons, and splice the end portions of the Branchline sides. This included the mounting pins. This also meant that I'd gain the strap braces that secure the ends on the prototype, and the mounting locations for the ladders. I also filled in the missing portion above the door with strip styrene. In hindsight, I should have scribed deeper boards in the Branchline portions to more closely match the Athearn side. 

The rest of the model is the Branchline kit as designed. I touched up the sides with a blend of Vallejo white and off-white and the rest of the car is painted using Stynylrez black primer. This matched the scheme of the Greenway model, although I didn't paint the sill yellow.

It's a fictional car, but a fun addition to the roster. I couldn't fit the brewery on the layout, but operationally it was served out of Whiting St. Yard by one of the Holyoke freights. So it can be dropped off overnight or in the morning, to be taken back off the layout in the afternoon. 

Cremo Brewery closed in 1955, but Alvarium Brewery in New Britain has resurrected the brand.  I think I'll have one.

A quick post

 

More to come (relatively) soon, but here are a couple of quick photos with some previews.

These are of the incredible work Chris Adams did weathering one of my 44-tonners. Look for an article in RMC in the near future from Chris. He weathered his first, but needed new pictures so needed to do another one. 

Hmmm.... something else new is underway in this photo crossing Elm St.

Here's a little patch of further ballast/ground cover experiments at Whiting St.

It helps to have a piece of weathered equipment to see how it actually looks. Most of the layout will be cinders and it has been a challenge finding the right approach, but I think I have finally found it.

More to come, but I couldn't be happier to have a model on the layout that Chris did. It looks incredible, and his Facebook and blog posts (and forthcoming RMC article) will be my go-to references for my weathering process. I've already been picking up some supplies that he uses that I didn't have. I have five in progress, along with two S-1s that are also ready for lettering and weathering. Hoping to complete them all before the end of the year.

It's a primary locomotive for the 1953 operating sessions that are my initial focus. I wonder who will be the first engineer?

Assembling the Rapido 44-tonner

It should come as no surprise that I have several of the Rapido 44-tonners.  This includes a couple of the decorated ones, along with four (for now) undecorated ones that I'll be doing in other paint schemes.  It was also a nice surprise to find I was mentioned in the manual (in French too!). (It should also come as no surprise that I started this post on November 18...).  

 

Like many undecorated locomotives, these are unassembled. Most of the assembly is pretty straightforward, but since instructions aren't included I thought I'd mention a few things.  First, there are details that need to be installed on the running boards, but holes have not been pre-drilled. But there are dimples underneath for that purpose, you just need to figure out which ones are needed, since not all are used for every phase.

Looking at the picture below, here are what the holes are for (on the NH models, anyway):

• Blue - bell. There's a hole at the other end of tanks too, which may be used for the bell on other roads.
• Green - steps for Phase Ic models. The one closer to the edge is also the alignment for the skirt. You need to drill the hole in the semi-circular portion closer to the center of the model.
• Yellow - steps/curved portion of the cab for Phase III model. This probably applies to the Phase IV models too, but I don't have one to verify.

The side frames that come preinstalled are the later version, for the Phase III and Phase IV models. They need to be replaced for the Phase Ic version. I did this the hard way, not realizing that they trucks themselves are easily removed (I hadn't read the portion of the manual regarding removing the coupler, since I wasn't planning on doing that...).

You do need to remove the pickup contact strips to install on the other side frames. It appears they attached them using heat to melt the plastic pins. It's easy enough to pry the strips off the plastic sideframes.

To install them on the new sideframes I didn't want to use heat.  Instead, I applied a liberal amount of styrene cement and used the flat end of a pair of tweezers to mash them down.

I won't bother to explain the process I had to use to reinstall the trucks since you all know now that you can simply pull and turn to remove the entire truck assembly.

As for other details, note that the New Haven units used one of two horns.  The Phase Ic units had Wabco AA-2 horns.  The A-2 horn was produced in short and long bell versions. The AA-2 has the short stacked on top of the long.

The phase III and IV units used the long bell A-2.

Fiddling

Progress is one of those things that I think we all struggle with from time to time.  Tom Jacobs has his "hour a day" mantra and Chris Adams has "do one thing." Similar approaches are great ways to keep things moving.

My approach is similar, but in an ADHD bent rather than an OCD sort of way.  What's the difference? Chris and Tom get more things completed.

Rather than try to force myself to do those things that I should be doing, I've gone back to doing whatever I gravitate to instead. Lately that has been fiddling around with freight car kits. Cleaning flash off resin kits, drilling holes, etc. are great mindless things when my brain has had enough, but I want to keep busy. That has led to assembling some bodies and doing some of the detail work when a particular kit captures my interest. 

This leads to lots of projects in progress, but my theory is that they will all get finished eventually.  Progress is progress, after all. There is a bit of method to my madness, though.  When I start doing a particular task, such as cleaning flash or drilling holes, it's easy to just keep moving forward with that task.  Thus, pulling several kits (often with a theme) and completing the process on several.

In addition to getting to see the cool kits I've picked out over the years as important to my layout, right now it's a better approach for me.  Changes in work has left me more mentally fatigued than short on time. These more mindless tasks are good distractions, but also let me give my brain a rest.  The reality is, for me anyway, that my brain becomes more productive and finds solutions best when I don't think about them. So this approach ends up being helpful for my work and my modeling. The apparent chaos can be a good thing.

The big thing here is that, as a hobby, it's supposed to not only be fun, but engaging. It's a distraction from the rest of life, and a better one (at least for me) than just watching TV or videos online (I've done way too much of that already).  It's also a way of accomplishing things that are uniquely you.  Leaning into my nature has already made me far more productive, and I have already found solutions to some of the things that have been holding me back on those things that I should do.  As a result, I do want to complete a number of these works in progress, and get to a few critical things to get the layout fully operational again, and set up in a way that I can be prepared for regular sessions. And scenery.

So what have I been working on?

Rapido 44-tonners

Various Box Car Mini-kits and Kitbashes

Ballast and Cinders experiments

Painting and Weathering Ties Experiments

Resin Gondola Kits

Resin Reefer Kits

Reorganizing

NH DEY-3 Part IV: Painting

During the tail end of recovering from Covid I decided an easy thing to work on would be some painting. Getting out the airbrush is one of those things that seems much more complicated than it really is. Especially since I've set things up to be as quick as possible, both getting started and getting cleaned up. I've done a few posts on the DEY-3 project before:

Part I: Installing DCC  - Part II: Details - Part III: More Details

Some time ago I painted body and cab for what will be 0967, then installed the windows and it's ready for next steps. This was an easy job since it's all Pullman Green. I used Stynylrez gray primer and Badger New Haven Pullman Green.

Incidentally, 0967 also ran on the Valley Line for a while, and Chris has done an extensive series of how he modeled this locomotive. His progress is part of what got me looking at my models again. There's little point in me describing the same steps that he took for his excellent model. Here are his posts:

• Part 0: Research
• Part I
• Part II: Decoder Install and Test
• Part III: Bodywork
• Part IV: Adding Details
• Part V: More Details
• Part VI: Test Run
• Part VII: Low Profile Cab
• Part VIII: Painting
• Part IX: Lettering
• Part X: Weathering

Now that Chris has so thoughtfully asked (assigned) me to be editor of Speed Witch, I expect a draft of this article soon...

The second unit, 0994, was delivered in Hunter Green and Warm Orange. I had started this some time ago, but wasn't quite getting an orange that I liked. The Badger New Haven Warm Orange looks right, but over the gray primer it looked dingy.  So I tried it over Stynylrez white primer, and then it was too bright.

Then I found out Stynylrez has an orange primer (they also have a dark green). That's what I used this time, and the Badger looked good over it, but still not quite the correct orange. Orange paints are fairly transparent, and it takes several coats to get to the actual color that it appears with a full coat. I decided to take advantage of this effect and try what is often called a "filter."  This is using a thin coat of paint over the existing color in order to alter it. In this case, Vallejo Air orange had a bit more red (I think) in it. It doesn't look right by itself, but I thought that it would shift the Badger orange just enough.  After a couple of thin coats of the Vallejo orange, I compared it to the NH Color Guide paint chip:

It's not a perfect match, but I'm very happy with how close it is. It's also repeatable, and that's what I did for the back of the cab - Stynylrez orange primer, Badger NH Warm Orange, and Vallejo Air orange in that order. The green is Stynylrex green primer with Badger NH Hunter Green. Here it is next to the Pullman Green 0967. The back of the cab looks like it has a bit more red in this photo, but that appears to be a combination of the lighting, angle, and how the camera picks it up since it doesn't look that way in person. 

I also compared it to the Life-Like factory colors on the RS-2. Again, close enough for me.  Mike Redden included pre-cut masks for the fillet with the low-profile cab kits, so I masked it up and added that. Here are the with windows, crew and interior. 

I plan on a gloss coat, probably of Future (I have some left) or Quick Shine (a different brand of what seems identical).  Part of the reason is that these products can also be used to eliminate scratches and clarify clear parts. So I won't need to mask the windows (just cover up the engineer behind the open one).  Once the lettering is done, I will do a semi-gloss finish since these are relatively new locomotives on my layout. Then weathering.