The FA-2 Project

While these Lionel FA-2s were always a nice little set for the money, many 'WTFs' ruined what could have been a truly great out-of-the-box set of engines. With that thought in mind, my latest weathering project also entailed a few quick operating and visual improvements. The first thing to fix was the huge coupling gaps. A couple sets of Kadees allowed me to push all the units together so the nice diaphragms Lionel tooled up could actually touch. With my layout's wide curves, I wasn't too worried about running these puppies on curves smaller than O-54. Because the sole purpose of mounting the Kadees was to get the gaps tight, I didn't set them up to standard height off the rail. Doing so would have had me grinding off the original electrocoupler mounts. That extra bit of work was skipped. Closeup below. No major operational problems were encountered and these beasts even climb my toytrainish O-54 'back road' line which sports a roughly 3% grade at some points. Another quick fix was to straighten the steps as seen above. For some really strange reason, the originals had an outward curve for what I presume was for coupler swing on tight curves. Why scale models have to be manufactured to traverse O-27 Christmas layouts is beyond me, but these were straightened very easily using a small hobby vise. Note the lit diaphragms and heat exchanger details. Lionel tooled these up quite nicely. It will be a real shame when they produce these again with their jacked-up single axle pieces of crap they are currently using to ruin what used to be viable models in their lineup. The last thing (OK it should have been the first!!) was to yank those insane 'we are trying to burn through our supply of 6 billion' bug-eyed crew figures. A set of MTH cab figures filled in nicely. Lighting in the cab was also subdued (the real cause of the bug eyes?) by moving one of the overhead cab lamps under the cab figures, and removing the second one altogether. I also blacked out as much of the interiors with some Grimy Black to de-emphasize the interior and to help hide the many wires running back and forth in there. The rear-facing A-unit was depopulated and all the cab lighting removed. Another strange feature was a backwards 'S' posing as a '2' in the numberboards and cab sides. A very careful scraping with a dental pick got the numberboards fixed and some gold paint applied with said pick also fixed the cab numbers. Look closely at the third shot to see what I mean, as I was too lazy to modify the smaller sets of road numbers. Weathering was your standard dusting of Grimy Black, Rust, RR Tie Brown, and some hints of Dirt.