I did a search on ebay for Southern Pacific HO and ran across this... http://cgi.ebay.com/HO-ATHEARN-DD40...tu=UCC&otn=15&ps=63&clkid=8502251046698491953 Scroll down the page to see the detailed photos.
Oh no! It's awful! It doesn't look right and from a railway/engineering perspective there never could be a prototype for it (you only have to look at the power, weight and number of axles involved). OK, he says it's not finished, but it's kinda hard to see where it's going if not to where it more or less is now. Yuck and double yuck. (Just MHO of course ) Oh, and the trailing units aren't slugs in my book - they appear to have power units in them which makes them calves.
SP did have some DD35s. But that's about the extent of this lashup's prototypical character. The booster DD35s (they were essentially two cabless GP35s joined at the butt, meant to be used with a GP35 at each end) didn't have the SD45-like slanting radiators, though the later cabbed units did. Looks more like a semi-trailer train concept gone bonkers. I can imagine the tonnage hanging on that teensy-weensy drawbar! :mwacko:
L.I.B. M.R.DUCKS! Truth is at least as strange as fiction... I still don't understand why the calves/slugs/whatever only had one set of trucks each... unless that's just because he hadn't yet re-mounted the others. And why the wiring between them??? Wouldn't it be much cleaner to either (DC) let each unit pick up its own rail power, or (DCC) install 3 decoders with the same address (or just consist them)?
i missed the part were he ripped out trucks and used drawbars i thought he was selling one cabbed and two cabless dd35's
It looks like he had this grand idea for a 3-unit MU set, then he got about halfway through the project before realizing it was hopelessly ill-conceived, and now he's trying to recover his investment... Seems like it would have been a whole lot easier just to rework the shells on 3 DD40's (or 35's or whatever) and leave the chassis alone....
I saw this too, searching ebay for DD40/DD35 stuff. Can't afford any of them but I like to look. I can buy into the wired together part, having DCC-phobia myself...but I cannot fathom the "piggy-back" concept. I guess this is taking free lance to it's extreme?:tb-tongue:
I'm telling you, put a DD40/35 on ebay and it will be bid throught the roof. I gotta say I was still a little surprised at what this one went for. Go figure.
