Some day the real 786 will be running again from Cedar Park to Burnet, just north of Austin, Texas. Here is a Kato Mike that I bashed to look kind of like it.
Last week I posted a photo of Donovan in front of his layout. This week I have 9 pics viewing his layout from left to right.
They were a special run for a layout featured in Model Railroader. They are available from Micro-Scale..
Hey Flash, If I'm not mistaken,I still have the set that was included in MR in my desk. Their yours if you want them. I'll be up there next week & I can look for them. Happy Birthday PowerSteam & Happy belated Birthday Pete Nolan
Soon Russ, soon... Russ, rumor has it that 786 will be up and running by at least next year. I have some faint memories of her, but I was 8 years old when she last ran 8 years ago, and now I hope to get some pictures of her up and running! :angel: Cross those fingers! :angel: :teeth: :shade:
SNFF 2007 2 4 Great pics, everybody! Here's my photo for the week. Thanks to Randgust, for his inspiration. Randy, here is your Santa Fe Peavine Line accomodation passenger train #42 / #47, Ash Fork - Phoenix, Ariz. They were nicknamed the "Hassayampa Chief" (although Santa Fe never gave these particular trains any formal name) - they ran along the Hassayampa River in south-central Arizona on their way up and down the Peavine Line. These trains supplied Santa Fe passengers a connection from Phoenix to the transcontinental Santa Fe Passenger trains such as the Chief, the Grand Canyon, and after June 1954, the San Francisco Chief. All three of these trains passed through Ash Fork somewhere between 10pm and 1am every night. Here is #42/ #47 as the they might have appeared circa June 1954: Here is where that part of Arizona and the Peavine Line is, see the route labeled " Santa Fe, Prescott, and Phoenix " in the following graphic: I'm sorry, I can't remember the web site where I found this graphic - since this is just a Weekly Photo Fun, I'll post. However, if the author sees this and wishes me to either give credit or pull the graphic, just email me and I'll be happy to do so. You can see more about this particular 200 mile long branch line of the Santa Fe, still in heavy operation by BNSF, at the following railfan's web site: http://www.geocities.com/~aeromoe/Peavine.html The railfan who built the above web site did a great job, and I share it here as well also in the spirit of sharing on SNFF. I hope you enjoy this little trip down memory lane on a little known but rather important branch of the Santa Fe and BNSF. Have a good week, all.
Here is one of the two peninsulas on my layout. The right side is "Downtown" and the left side is "Westside." The Downtown business area is called St. Paul's Square. See the white spot on the right side next to the tan four story building? That is the subject of the current Layout Party. I am going to build a structure for that site in the next five weeks. See the thread here. My town area: Check out the thread and join the party! :thumbs_up:
Here we are entering the second deck, above the main yard. At the extreme upper right, you can see where we are going about two scale miles from now. That's the grade to next deck. The abandoned station behind the lead unit is scratchbuilt. The rock cliff is a photograph of a granite cliff in Alaska. We're somewhere in mid-Massachusetts. A lot of tobacco is grown here, especially in the Connecticut River Valley. The tobacco is used as the finest of wrappers for cigars.
This is the abandoned tower at Greenfield Junction, a surpisingly busy place in the middle of nowhere. On the track furthest right are E-8s assigned to freight service, waiting with empty stock cars. Given the track arrangement here, he's going to have to pull past the tower, and then back onto the mainline. It's always surprising to me how a telephoto can make track look very wavy. This was shot at about 70mm on a DSLR (105mm equivalent). Most of the waves are actually dips. I'm finding the foreshortening effects of a longer lens really help on a shelf that's 23 feet long and only 17 inches wide.
This was shot at 85mm on a DSLR. I built parts of the creamery from N-Scale Architects backwards--it turned out OK! Here the slight mismatch of modules doesn't show. The tall tree above the smoke stack hides a seam in the backdrop.
This is the beginning of the Harrington Farms loop. You can see the Creamery at the far left. We'll do a loop around the farm, and start climbing on the far wall. This is a retake of a shot I did a few years ago. I think I'm getting this N scale photography down a bit!
This weekend I had my monthly operating session on the Peoria and Pekin Union Railway in N-Scale. One of the operators, Mike Broshear, brought some cars and loads from his own layout, the Chicago, Peoria, and St Louis, a free-lanced layout representing what the M&StL would look like if it had lasted another decade or 2 in the Peoria Area. He has modified several commercial products (Chooch, Bachman? and Dressel??) to simulate loads from the East Peoria Caterpillar Plant that each of us models on our layouts. The tire loads are from a Chooch HO gon load. Mike has modified the earth mover and scraper by narrowing them to fit on N-scale flat cars. Other Cat tractors (not pictured) have been modified by separating the scrapers or tracks from the frames and loading them on separate flat cars for transporting (just like the prototype did). The SW is now mine, but was painted and decorated by the late Jerry Reinman of Morton Illinois sometime in the 1980s, I believe. It still runs well but is not converted to DCC.
