Bill Welch has adapted the HO scale Kadee brake gear and brake wheel detail parts to use in updating other models. Here’s Bill with his techniques.
I have known for awhile now that Kadee sells their assembled brake gear and wheel part direct to consumers. A phone call was recently placed to Sam Clark at Kadee and I ordered a variety of their parts even though I was not sure how I would attach them to models. I know Detail Associates offers brake wheel and gears but they are getting hard to find and they are not a finely rendered as the Kadee parts.
Nelson Moyer returns with build tips and techniques for duckunders. Click on any image here to review a larger size. Here’s Nelson with his latest tale.
Burlington Yard and Winfield Duckunder
Duckunders are to be avoided. That’s a cardinal rule of layout design. However, there are circumstances where duckunder alternatives are impossible, and my track plan presented me with no choice if I was going to model even a severely truncated facsimile of the CB&Q yard at Burlington, IA. By referring to the track plan in Part 1 of the series, it is immediately evident that the longest unbroken spaces in my basement are on the North and South outside walls, and those walls measure 16- and 18-feet, respectively. That’s not nearly long enough for Burlington, and the placement of those walls is totally wrong for a geographical approximation of the prototype.
We kick off a new blog feature with this photo. Every now and then an image will show up on Wednesday for a look at something on our workbench. The photo could be for an upcoming kit, or model progress by one of our RCW minions, or something cool we found, like these Klasing brake wheels on Shapeways.
No. 45, the westbound KC Local, behind a USRA light Mikado, hustles into Metcalf, Ill., on Tony Koester’s HO tribute to the Nickel Plate Road’s St. Louis Division in 1954. The LCL boxcar behind the rider car looks like a blue-box kit, but its heritage is the last thing on the minds of the local’s crew as they plan their work in town and watch out for superior eastbound trains.
Tony Koester, editor of Kalmbach’s annual Model Railroad Planning and the Trains of Thought columnist and a contributing editor for Model Railroader, responded to an inquiry about his views of modeling a specific prototype vs. using one or more prototypes as the basis for a plausibly freelanced model railroad. Here’s Tony with more.
We keep trying to draw a line in the sand between prototype modeling and any form of freelancing. In my view, that’s both a waste of time and usually based upon faulty assumptions.
Let’s start with prototype modeling. As most of us who have done this to any extent have discovered, we are almost always faced with the choice of not getting much done, often owing to a lack of “complete” information, or the desire to make progress. “Analysis paralysis” is a very real aspect of prototype modeling. Many a grand plan has come to ruin on its shores.
