Latest Roster Additions

Recently, I've been on a pretty serious Pennsy bender. With the lack of any decent PRR motive power being offered by any of the three rail companies recently, I found myself searching the secondary market for my needs. After geeking out to Don Ball's "The Pennsylvania Railroad 1940s - 1950s" for almost 10 years now and discovering Stauffer's Pennsy Power trilogy in the past couple, I was dead set on acquiring a set of Centipedes and at least one Decapod for my layout. Some recent dealings on some used equipment netted me a trio of interesting motive power projects. I obtained this set of MTH PS1 Centipedes pictured below in the early 5 stripe scheme that had never seen the rails. After chucking an Energizer in it to see how it ran with its original electronics, I almost gleefully set about gutting it out to make way for some Train America Studios products. I ordered an EOB motherboard with Lionel RailSounds (Alco C420 set), a dummy board w/R2LC for the B unit and a set of triacs to run both smoke units from one R2LC in each unit. The dummy board with its own R2LC handles the rear headlight, coupler, and smokers in the B unit. Installation wasn't too awful difficult as there was plenty of room to mount everything. The original four wire tether was retained to tie all the pickups and grounds in and to connect the B unit motors to the EOB now living in the A unit. A single EOB setup was able to power all four motors. TAS supplied me with some additional triacs and some pull-up resistors to allow control of both smoke units in each locomotive to be controlled from a single R2LC. I added a Digital Dynamics bass-enhanced speaker and attempted to seal all vent openings with electrical to get the best possible sound out of the beasties. Operationally, I assigned new engine ID's (same for both units) and found the default pulse tuning parameters to be perfect. I did discover one minor tracking problem over my Atlas #5 switches due to the forward-facing pickup rollers on the rear power trucks dropping down and causing the trucks to lift. I plan on adding a couple of short, unpowered chunks of rail to keep them up when traveling through the curved part of the turnout. As required with all my equipment, a combination of airbrush and brush-applied weathering was added to give the impression of long hours spent in unforgiving conditions. Some photos are shown below. As usual, click on each image to view larger version and use your browsers's back button to return. An engine that I've sort of been obsessed over owning for quite some time is a Pennsy Decapod. With it's ten drivers and no-nonsense demeanor, I felt it was a must-have for my layout. While I contemplated getting the recent die-cast MTH version with PS2, I felt that it would be too much money spent as I intended to convert it to TMCC almost immediately after getting a hold of it. Luckily, an older 3rd Rail brass version was obtained through the OGR Forum Buy/Sell board. This is my first brass acquisition and I found it to be quite the interesting piece. I took some time to acquaint myself with its full frame and sprung drivers, something sorely lacking in similarly-priced scale diecast steam. This particular model came without any form of command control or sound. I opted for a TAS SAW board with Lionel Pennsy Atlantic RailSounds and decided against adding smoke. While the SAW board doesn't give me closed loop control over the speed like EOB, the Dec's 32:1 gear ratio gave me nice response to the CAB-1's speed commands and the low gearing helped maintain a fairly consistent speed without the need for electronic feedback to the motor driver circuit. I had to add my own Electrocoupler from one of my parts piles and changed out the headlamp for a 1.5volt one mounted to the back of an MV Models lens. Aside from my normal weathering, I also applied a bit of weathering chalks to the running boards and also decided to add a fairly unique detail I've only seen in my favorite Pennsy books. Some photos of hard-working Hippos showed piles of cinders tucked against the boiler on the running boards. One extremely soot-blasted prototype in my Don Ball book showed a nice pile of them tucked against the front of the sand dome. I attempted to add this little tweak to my Dec to give the impression of some serious hard work being put in on the rails by using a bit of Woodland Scenics fine cinders fastened with some diluted white glue: Before acquiring the above two behemoths, I also added another Lionel PRR M1a to my fleet. This one already had EOB and a Puff n Chuff board added by its previous owner. I made some minor mods to the smoke unit wiring which entailed removing the ACRG board (a serial-controlled 7VAC constant voltage board) and wiring the smoker to the motherboard 'smoke' terminal. I also removed the TAS 5VDC power supply for the PnC board and used the 5volt circuit Lionel builds into its smoke unit to run it. I also took a couple minutes to tweak the smoke unit itself using my simple mods. This setup gives me CAB-1 control of the unit while adding the TAS synchronized puffing effect that their board is so good at doing. Weathered to represent some environmental epxosure, it now looks like this: Being that it's the second one added to my fleet, a renumbering was in order. I used some Microscale decals to change the cab numbers along with the boilerfront Keystone. I took some time tonight to snag some quick footage of these engines in action. The file is roughly 18meg so it may best to right click on the link and save it to your desktop for quickest download: Video (.wmv format)