Model Railroader December 2021

Cody’s Office After more than 13 years, we’re sad to announce the final installment of Model Railroader’s longest running video series, Cody’s Office. Join Group Technical Editor Cody Grivno as he wraps up his show on episode 275 with an Atlas locomotive, a Trains special issue, and a message to his longtime viewers. Become a Trains.com member for unlimited access to all the episodes of Cody’s Office and other Model Railroader video series. Meet the MR&T State Line Route Hurry on over to Trains.com to watch our exclusive video series, State Line Route in N scale. Hosted by David Popp, the Model Railroader and Trains.com staff are teaming up to build an N scale project railroad from scratch, drawing inspiration from the legendary HO scale Milwaukee, Racine & Troy. Stay tuned to see…

Magical things happen when you combine modeling know-how with a touch of artistic license. John Vavra, whose HO scale 20 x 22-foot layout is pictured at left and on this month’s cover, needed a way to combine two very different prototype interests – Colorado narrow gauge tourist steam operation and modern-day Santa Fe railroading. Enter artistic license. John not only moved the Santa Fe mainline 130 miles north, he used actual place names without exactly replicating those locations. He’s content if he can capture something of the feel of those places even if it isn’t a perfect copy. This imaginative approach meets John’s goals. His layout plausibly includes the railroads he most enjoys in the settings he prefers. The main lines for narrow gauge steam and heavy-duty modern diesels weave over and under each…

HO scale Electro-Motive Division GP60 diesel locomotive. Athearn Trains offers this Roundhouse line model decorated for BNSF Ry. (Heritage III in two numbers, Vermont Ry. patchout in one number), CSX (dark blue and yellow), Denver & Rio Grande Western (black and orange with “Flying Grande” lettering), Norfolk Southern (black and white with “Operation Lifesaver” lettering, two numbers), Southern Pacific (scarlet and gray with speed lettering), and Vermont Ry. (red and white, one number) in three numbers per scheme unless noted. The HO scale locomotive has factory-installed and painted wire grab irons, Celcon handrails, and light-emitting-diode headlights. Direct-current models with a 21-pin NEM plug for Digital Command Control decoder sell for $149.98. Versions with an NCE non-sound Digital Command Control mobile decoder are priced at $184.98. Athearn Trains, 800-338-4639, athearn.com HO scale locomotives •…

Santa Fe’s NCX: A freight you can model Q I’ve heard about a freight train the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Q operated in the early 1970s and earlier in California called the NCX. The few references I’ve seen indicate it was a hotshot intermodal train. This train sounds interesting, especially since it ran at the same time as the famous Santa Fe Super C. There’s not much information on this train on the internet, but it sounds like a good train to model. Please share anything you have. Steve Novotny, South Pasadena, Calif. A Northern California Express, or NCX, was an eastbound regular manifest running from Los Angeles to Richmond, Calif. (Although it ran north, in Santa Fe parlance, anything away from Los Angeles was considered timetable east.) Its westbound counterpart was…

Cut ’em off at the fascia Tony Koester’s Trains of Thought column in June’s issue resonated with me, as I have had to face a similar issue on my layout. Many of my structures are scratchbuilt, and due to the narrow benchwork on my layout, most of them are truncated at the fascia. I considered installing black fascia pieces for the “fourth wall” of the building, but I thought that they visually distracted from the look I was after. So instead, I painted the fourth wall and weathered it to match the rest of the building. Astute viewers realize quickly that the real building isn’t as narrow as represented on my layout, but visually it looks a lot better then a blank wall. One problem I ran into, though, was that I…

Thirty five years ago, then-associate editor Jim Kelly wrote about modeling Continental Grain Co. in HO scale. The large export grain elevator, featured in the November 1986 Model Railroader, was part of the city scene on the original Milwaukee, Racine & Troy (MR&T) when Kalmbach’s offices were located at 1027 N. 7th Street in downtown Milwaukee. Because of how the grain elevator was positioned on the old layout, the back of the main elevator building wasn’t visible, so Jim used a piece of unpainted tempered hardboard there. On the current MR&T, all sides of the elevator can be seen, so he replaced the hardboard with styrene and added the same window castings he used on the other three sides. While Jim was at it, he built new silos and a headhouse that…