Recent action on the QA&P (HO scale)

That middle photo is my favorite. Great angle and greater modeling.

 

Super Tom!
K

 

Some farmers seem to be doing OK along the QA&P. With this order of Cat rubber crawler tractors, to be delivered in Paducah. They are riding on a used ex-ATSF flat car.
The Q acquired 3 such cars, re-stenciled and put into service.

 

Years ago I had an idea that all the gondolas that had been acquired, well, there needed to have a set of loads available, now not knocking all the commercial loads available, but they kinda all look the same. I came up with a system to make my own removable loads, using again, scrap materials on hand or easily attainable. Most of my flat bottom gons are Athearn /MDC/Proto, many more, but this is the majority. A lot of other mfgr will accept these loads too, these are just the molds I came up with.


Then, using scraps of 1/9 Masonite, strips were cut to fit the molds, painted flat black, then using strips of wax paper, were gently pressed into the molds, taking care to ensure all the wax paper was squared and not torn. The material I used was like what Sherrel and others have used and are simply floor sweepings from a machine shop, have a great MRR friend that owned his own shop so there is ample supply, here is a couple pics of this.




There are as many different glues to hold all this together as there are people doing it, so for this I used, yep you guessed it, what was on hand. Semi gloss clear coating in this case a Deft product, water soluble. Loaded the molds as wanted, heap it there, thin here. I wonder if that glue that is used in hodge podge type would be better cause this stuff took days to dry, remember it needs to be thin enough to penetrate and bond every little piece. Used a blotter thing to apply the bonding agent.


Using the holes in the bottoms of the jigs, the new loads were gently pressed out of their molds, at this time you can apply some color to a few pieces of the scrap if you wish, then a generous Krylon dull coat was applied. Used a magic maker to identify fit.


I had Flat bottom gon right behind the power on a train one time, couldn't see the load, but the wheel report showed 260,000 lbs. Well being the kind of WTH? kind of guy I am, I climbs up and see all these 4"-6" steel balls just a few layers deep, turns out the car was headed to Nevada to a mine ball mill, and they are used to process ore.
So, I ask a friend who "loads his own" to donate a baggie full of "shot" for the cause, now we got many loads of HO scale mill balls. Pictured is not my best effort too much glue.


This is just a couple loads rolling around his outfit.


This is an Athearn car (acquired ebay) with shortened skirts, kinda like the short skirts myself...






I will be posting more images of these efforts, just wanted to let you know how I got here, many different things we can do using this method while getting realistic results, you could use a magnet to unloads these too.
This is the kind of stuff I can do wounded, basically have more than needed, dont want to go into the official bidness of load mfg, but I would be happy to build a few for my Frisco family. I think $9.00 each plus shipping, I only ship USPS PM, "Click n Ship" cause the post office comes to me. PM me if you want a few Ath/MDC/Proto loads.
Thanks for looking.

 

That has incredible detail! I like the method you use. I may copy cat you to make a coal load for my wooden gondola.

 

Have at it my friend!!

 

Tom -
Great work!, thanks for the details.
I've made several loads for gons and open top hoppers myself. What I did was less original and less sophisticated than your methods. I used the available loads from the HO manufacturers but applied my own realistic toppings to them. Using them as a base, I applied coal, ballast, wood chips, metal scrap, chemicals (sulfur), iron ore, gravel, junk, quartzite, etc to the top of the inserted loads, using flat liquid Dullcoat brushed from a bottle as the binder (apply generously before applying the topping). Worked great. Can't show you any of them, as they all sold last August in our binge estate sale - except for the two Gould ore hoppers with full iron ore for the Sligo Iron Works, Newburg, Mo, buried in the boxes down in our storage locker.
This way I took advantage of the contour, and fit, of the existing load inserts from the kit manufacturers. I had a lot of open hoppers, many of them Bowser. The Bowser coal load is terrible, but it has a nice contour, and fits their various cars perfectly. Trying to make use of them is what led me to this method. Easy, cheap, and looks great.
K

 

Steve -
We used a ball mill now and then in a few of our plants. They are good for grinding up hard materials. The mill is a big cylindrical vessel with some internal baffles, containing the mill balls, made of hardened steel. You feed in the product in and then turn on the machine such that it spins at a fairly low speed. The product and the balls flop around together, and the balls bash up the product into finer particles. The thing discharges into a vibrating screen, which sifts out the fine particles you want, and recycles the oversize back in.
Kind of a primitive mill, and as you might suspect, they make an incredible racket!
K

 

One of the industries on my layout will be Federal Materials, a crushed limestone business that used a ball mill to make the various grades of gravel that they sold. Somewhere in a drawer I have what is left of a mill ball from their mill; it is roughly about 3/4" in 'diameter' with concave divots all over the surface. It is no longer a sphere and looks more like a meteorite than what it was.

 

had an op session yesterday with some friends ran a few trains, had a great time seeing everyone. Now that our 1 week of fall has come and seems to be gone, the colder weather will allow more time in the MRR barn.

On the Xovers at Cliff


On the QA&P bridge west of Quanah.

 

Filmed at an op session a couple weeks ago.

 

With the search bar not working sometimes it makes it difficult to post on older threads, tonight I got lucky and it worked. Just a couple images from our op session yesterday.
I dont like my smart phone camera, for MRR images, absolutely no depth of field.

 

The QA&P picked up the lease on EMDX 5, a GP60 demonstrator. The GP60 series were very good locomotives a few RR's just ran the wheels of these things 500mile days were not uncommon, and these units did it for months at a time without a single failure. I had 4 of them on a unit auto rack train some 60+ cars and boy did we zip home that night. Just the thing these locomotives were made for. A few of the images on the web showed the brake cylinders all had been changed on this unit, so I paints them in primer, per the images. There were 3 of these particular demonstrators, with the early 60 series dynamic brake blisters and those angle nose and cabs (all were 3D printed and designs of our Ryan Harris). Hardest part was getting the glued on Dyn/Cab/Nose off the P2K shell. I added a few details like air dryers/ filters, some piping and fuel tank details. These Demo units had like 4 different types of fuel fillers. I tried to match the paint as best I could, got close enough and the weathering took care of the rest. I tried to keep the weathering down a bit as EMD tended to keep these things looking fairly good. I didnt want it looking like it was headed to scrap LOL.
Anyway a few pics of it here on the ready tracks with a couple "Q" mates waiting on a TOFC shooter, I will try to get some action pictures soon.