Well...its been a wee while since I posted...been a tad busy.  what with uni, a very good friendship plus general life i havent had much time for model making.  Been to carlisle quite a bit by train, so thats something!  And the 350s arent bad to ride (though they could seriously do with coupling 2 together more regularly than they do...also...First Transpennine...I'm not sure how you actually manage to have a "technical fault" on a sodding refreshments trolley...did a wheel come off???)

DB schenker 60 and DRS 66 at Carlisle 22/05/15 on some sort of a ballast train.
Later saw this parked at kingmoor yard

..ramble ramble busy busy etc etc.  Havent even been along to the club very much its been that crazy!  But now I've got the summer before me i have a wee bit more time to "do" trains.

Went to a swapmeet recently and picked up a Kato NW2 switcher, in Maryland and Pennsylvania.  Very nice but i needed it in CN, so I've been repainting it...which is going a little better than i thought.  spray painting stock has always been my least favorite bit of modelling because
a) finish is always crap
b) i get covered in paint
c) the garage gets covered in paint
d) my model ends up worse than before!

But im actually pleased with the results so far.  I got the transfers off with a glass fibre pen, had to wear rubber gloves to do this as ive had experiences with glass fibres in my fingers before...urggghh. Then sprayed the body black and the ends orange.  Now really just need to scratchbuild new exhausts and get some CN logos + running no.

At the same swapmeet i got 3 nice books, one is a classification of american diesel locos (from the late 70s, so covers quite a lot of stuff even though obviously later mahooosive GE stuff isnt included).  Also one on the Baltimore & Ohio and another on the New York Central.  Been really nice with the weather recently to sit outside reading these, with a beer too...(I can feel like a real 'Murican! :-)  )

My new books!

repainting the ac4400 has been...um...well take a look...

hmmmm...

"oh dear" you say.  yes, I sprayed it with gloss paint without realizing it was gloss...now trying to redo it with railmatch red...yeah told you spray painting wasnt my strength :-/

The North American rail bug has bitten my brother a little more too...hes got himself an F7cab and booster units in pennsylvania rr colors. He's wanting to redo it in CP just for a wee spraying exercise.

Now finally heres a couple pics of the old layout we built in the attic , started this when i was 13!

layout

yeah its a mess!

we had some BS idea about it being freelance so we could run what we liked etc  decent standard for kids but wanting something better now...need to find a way to get the ballast and scenery off so we can reuse the old boards possibly...if the 2 (or 3! :-P ) people who read this have any ideas please let me know :-)

So anyways will need to measure the part of the attic we're using, so id better go do that now, have a good day!

wee edit: btw most probably know that here in scotland driver training has begun on the new borders line from Edinburgh to Tweedbank - if I get any photos of this in the near future I'll be sure to post them!

Canadian Railways....

Well, I've been into British trains for a long while...but over the last 6 months or so I have developed an interest in American and Canadian trains, specifically diesels.  Some dvds at my model railway club got me started, and of course now Youtube has been a great source of stuff.  I've now bought myself a nice potted history of the Canadian National railway by Tom Murray (see below)

And also a bunch of Dvds from greenfrog productions...I got all 4 of their volumes on the CN (including its operations in the states) and another one they sell courtesy of CanRail on branchlines in Ontario in the 90s.  I highly recommend these dvds, they are very good, lots of interesting info about the operations and great footage of the trains themselves.

The livery of the CN was what really stood out to me at first, the orange and black (and at one time with "zebra" stripes) I thought were really nice.  I've since also read about VIA Rail Canada, Canadian Pacific and also the nice Go Transit commuter trains (the ones with the unusual looking bombardier cars):

(by the way, the VIA rail site has some interesting stuff; they have 360 degree photos of the interiors of their different passenger cars.)


Anyways, this new interest in these railways then got me buying HO versions, starting off with a walthers trainline CN gp9rm and a bachmann CN gp38-2 from ebay.  The gp38-2 is currently being detailed, since there are A LOT of differences between a standard unit and the versions used by CN (not counting the widecab variants).  Of course bachmann just used one tooling across them all, but I can't really complain as they are pretty cheap.

 The gp9rm is to be an even bigger detailing project, as the body on the trainline version is....well...not very good.  I'll probably get a proto 2k or bachmann gp9 body and then a kaslo shops chop nose cab and do some serious cutting and glueing to make an accurate model.

Also now got a Pennsylvania Railroad Sd45.  Was wanting to maybe do this in Wisconsin Central livery for the club layout.  Bit scared to repaint it though...it does look nice though.  It can always sit on display if it doesnt get resprayed.

Also have a sw1200 in CP Rail (old "system") livery by Proto 2K.  Very nice also.

Aaaand.....a bachmann CP sd40-2...

My brother and I are now planning a layout in our attic based around the automobile industry, possibly set in Detroit. However there are automobile factories in Canada as well (such as in Oshawa) so we may have the layout set there; this would make sense as then we're not just limited to CN, we can run CP as well (though Detroit does allow for a fair bit of BNSF).

I've now bought a couple of tri-level auto carrier cars, and also a Walthers auto assembly plant kit.  I've built the front so far.  Some of the window pieces are missing (which is worrying!)  I'm debating wether to call Walthers or else just to make some out of plastic strip.

So anyways, thats my first entry into Canadian/American trains and any progress on modelling projects or even just links to interesting vids of rail action I will post on this "blog" thing.  Thanks to Alan Aitken for the suggestion of starting this!