4 Slow Months in the Shop: STC Workbench Update, Jan-April 2010

2010 has been kind of a slow year in the Saint Canard backshop so far, owing mostly to family matters (er, that would be "business" and not the Urkel show), work (that is if Kentucky's elected blowhards can pull their collective heads out of their asses), and a general feeling of malaise over the early winter months.   The overall lighting and ambiance in the new place’s basement just isn’t up to par, which makes photography a chore and general enjoyment difficult… so motivation wanes a bit.   I installed a cheap track lighting system to band-aid the situation this week; while not perfect by any means it nonetheless adds warmth and brightness, so we'll see how that pans out.  I could decide it's just the ticket, but I reserve the right to rip it out and set it on fire.

Really, what I need is a properly finished ceiling, but I promised Anna that I'd destroy and rebuild her craft room properly before I'd do that. Well, guess what I started doing last week? Sledgehammers and crowbars have always been my favorite tools!

So pull up a chair and pour out a cold one, cuz here’s a list and breakdown of some of the more interesting projects to emerge so far this year. Even though it's been a slow one, this is a long read. You know me: I can't shut up...

Rapido Caboose

OK, so this one isn't as much a credible project as it is an acquisition, but it was done out of research.   Any model railroader has doubtlessly read the hyperbole in the ads, and the fawning on the forums, and the general mystique surrounding these new canadian-prototype cabeese from Rapido.   At $60+ suggested retail, they are the undisputed kings of insanely-priced HO rolling stock.    And that's even after they amortized the tooling by offering it in dozens of "fantasy" schemes for roads that never owned one!   What if they stuck to the general creed of only offering it in prototype roads?   Would it cost $300?   Certainly THAT would be insane.   So is $60 worth it?

Your answer is: Maybe, if you luck into a dealer selling them for $35 at a train show, like I did.   The one I bought has since been seen bringing $70 on ebay.   I would NEVER pay that much, and I certainly would (and did NOT) pay the $60.   But that's a subjective observation - how about an objective one?

Ooooh, OK... it IS pretty. And the platform and end grabs are superbly rendered.

The model has flawless paint, metal wheels, nice heft and solid construction - but so do all the models from manufacturers charging half the price.   It might be worth pointing out that cabeese have traditionally been more expensive than a typical frieght car, owing to such details like windows, doors, end platforms and other oddball rigging.   But really, there's nothing more complex about all this than, say, the end cages on a Centerflow Hopper, or the door rigging on a Thrall-door.

Rapido's premium seems to come from three key features: a detailed interior, lighting, and a fully-detailed underframe.   So I'll address them specifically:

>1) The detailed interior is cool... perhaps even cooler if you've never googled about the interior of a caboose and have no idea what it looks like.   And you still should, because unless you want to take apart your shiny new $60 toy, you ain't gonna see the one inside.   They say it's there; I've looked in the windows and I guess it sort of is.   But it could be a melted gob of tic-tacs for all I know, or care to find out.

OK, now THIS is awesome. And probably the ONLY reason to consider buying this model.

2) The lighting is seriously cool, and very well done.   In fairness it's of the type of quality that might cost $10 in parts - plus your own time/cost in labor - to retrofit on your own.  The interior lights glow with a glazed green color, while the end marker lights are red.   This thing really does look awesome at the end of a train!  And it's DC/DCC ready to boot, and can be turned on or off with the magnetic wand provided.    THIS is a great feature.

DUDE! Check out all that piping! I can't wait to run it and see it and... oh... wait a minute...

3) Under-body hoses and piping were neat to look at when I took it out of the box... the novelty lasted all of 30 seconds.   I haven't paid them a moment's thought since it hit the track, and I can't see them, and I really have to wonder why anyone would pay for this stuff?   I supposed if I wanted to derail it, dent it up, and then toss it upside-down into a gondola or flat car as a wreck load, I might be able to see all that piping more often.   Otherwise, it's absolutely silly.    I get the reasoning behind other kits offering piping, as sometimes you do get profile of sorts when viewing at track level.   But ALL of it?   Anyone who claims they can see it all when it's on the track is either a liar, or someone who invented a glass-bottom roadbed and gets off by viewing the layout underground.

So... the interior and underframe details are utterly pointless.    But the lighting system is indisputably wonderful! So, if we start with a typical $30 premium HO caboose, you could say each of those features is "worth" $10 individually. Except the only one I'd pay for is the lighting... so I'd prefer a $40 model with just this feature. Which is essentially what I ended up with after all. Score!

One last dig by the way: for $60 and all their bragging about underframe hoses and interiors and platform grabs and other silly bits, the supplied knuckle couplers are the newly-dreaded "oversized" variety, and not scale. Noooooooo!!!

STC Rolling Stock inventory

I knew I had a lot of cars of varying type, and probably could've named them all if put to the test (please don't, thanks). But I didn't really have an inventory to give me an at-a-glance view of my fleet. How many boxcars vs. hoppers vs. intermodals? How many old versus new (in both prototype and model vendor)? Does the roadname mix heavily favor one road or another, and if so does it make sense for my purposes? And how many had I actually bothered to convert to Kadee/Knuckles back in the day, or weather? And how many of those I haven't should I invest in upgrading now? And which should I just get rid of?

To my amazement, it actually only took a few hours to haul everything out, unbox it all, sort it out, identify it, and build the roster!   The net damage is (drumroll!): about 400+ freight cars and nearly 100+ locomotives.   This roster is the stuff I consider "running"; the Tyco collection and other sentimental / vintage / curiosity / conversational / parts / junk pieces are excluded.

I'm not sure whether to be proud or ashamed. It sounds like a lot but in many ways it's not. Certainly, I know people who are done and happy with a 4x8, a half-dozen locos and a few dozen freight cars. But then I also know people for whom 400 freight cars barely makes a dent in a yard scene. And I know people with twice that many which have never even been assembled nor run! There's no right-or-wrong way to go about it, but in the end I've been satisfied with the fleet and in truth I haven't acquired that much in the last few years. A few points worth considering: 1) It's been built up over 25+ years; 2) 90% of it was acquired before 2005 (when prices began their insane upward trajectory) and most of it at discount; 3) I grew up in (yes, practically in) one of the largest and busiest railroad yards in Chicago, and saw everything - so it's hard to pick a single poison, as it were.

Some other points:  I have a very nice blend of Chessie/B&O/C&O vs. RockIsland vs. "other" roadnames, vis-a-vis my intentions.   Hoppers and boxcars comprise roughly 30% of the fleet each, respectively, with all other types comprising the balance; if you consider the makeup of most through- and mixed-freight trains in the 1970-80's, this is actually about right! So it seems there is a method to my madness - however subconsciously it manifests, and however strange or obsessive it may seem to the uninitiated!

But perhaps the most telling point is: for all I have, I'm very happy with it and don't really crave much more. In truth, I could be happy with less but the variety and the hunt and opportunities are all part of it to me. But there's only about a dozen or so other cars I can recall that fit the "couldn't pass it up if I found one" category, and I'll keep en eye out for those. So for the most part, I think I'm more or less done.

If you're interested you can download and view the roster spreadsheet here. Eh, never mind, that's silly.

Quick-weathered Freight Cars (and a Locomotive!)

I love creating weathered cars, but simply haven’t had the time to do it! And that'd be because I have a habit of spending far too much time (1 hour plus!) on one car - not counting prep, clean-up, and touch-up - which is great when you don’t have kids or responsibilities, but becomes untenable when you have hundreds of cars and too many other interests and kids and cars and a house and friends and...!   Net result:  I haven't weathered anything worth a damn in two years.

Weathered in 45 minutes, just to experiment. This one is supposed to look well-worn.

But I was working on the inventory I came across a couple of old Life-Like 50’ Evans High-Cube boxcars.  The paint schemes were always well done and the tooling was decent, and they can be used even in a "modern standards" layout, but nonetheless they were and are cheap cars – perfect for shaking the rust off (pun!) and getting the juices flowing.   My objective was to do some very quick work – the two boxcars and a classic AHM 3-bay covered hopper in an hour.   No paints or airbrushing because that takes too much time to prep and clean.   My only tools would be pastels, powders, sponges, and craft paints (the cheapo acrylic kind) suitable for sponge-dabbing and drybrushing.

Quickies aren't all bad...

So here’s the result:  nothing fancy, nothing sock-knocking, and nothing incredible.  But they have a nice toned-down color and plausible coat of grime, and look good when blended in as part of a train.  For about 20 minutes per car (the boxcars were probably 10-15, while the hopper was more complex) I won't complain!   There's certainly room for improvement, but then again, I've seen (and done) a lot worse.   I'm happy with them - they don't need to be perfect, they're not meant for contests or show.  Besides, in my modeling era these cars would have been relatively new, and therefore not too beat-up!

STC Heritage Boxcars

In late 2009 I experimented with a spare Tyco 40’ boxcar and created a back-dated scheme for the Saint Canard Midland.  How'd I do this?  Let's start with some consideration:  Blue and Green have always been primary colors in the STC’s corporate image, so a combination thereof would be prescient.   Since the STC’s modern “tree-track” logo was created in the mid/late 1960’s, I had to devise a scheme more typical of previous decades, or at least contemporary to the 1950’s through mid-60s’ aesthetics.

This actually wasn’t hard, because colors from the era are readily displayed in any ancient hospital, school, or library you may encounter.  Old books and magazines (not to mention railroad materials) are a treasure-trove of period graphics, marketing layouts and design fads.   Now, remember how I said the STC was keyed by blue and green?   Consider the color turquoise or aquamarine:  a sea-foam blue-green color that was all the rage in the middle part of the 20th century.   Variant shades were even used by railroads, most notably the “Jade Green” made famous by the New York Central (later Penn Central).  Of course I wanted the STC to be a little different, so Jade Green was out; since it’s not 1960 anymore Turquoise paints are hard to come by.   I did have one lone bottle of a custom teal-ish color that I didn’t even remember buying (maybe when I did the piggyback trailers a few years ago?)  but it was almost empty - good for just one car.    Fortunately I found a spray can of a Testor's Model Master "General Motors 50's Teal" which would work well.

The logo was also easy, as I’d drawn a version of it back in my angsty high-school days, although I didn’t know it at the time.    Well duh, I knew I drew a logo of course, as the paper was right in front of me – but I didn’t really have any specific concept of timeframe in mind.  I just drew what popped in my head for fun, knowing it would be years before I could apply it to a model.    By the time I *was* ready to apply it to a model, I realized it looked far too old.   But it was too neat to shelve forever, so what’s a few more years in waiting for the right usage worth?

Recreating the logo for color separations was the hard part, but once it was done it was well worth the effort!

(The original was drawn and colored by my hand in 1991, back when CSX had a newly bright future. My dad actually laminated and framed it.)

It's a bit more teal in person (basement lighting fail at work)

I ended up making a small fleet of boxcars: two 40-footers and one 50-footer, all classic Tyco tooling. I only had enough of my original “turquoise” paint to do one car, so I used the Testor’s GM Teal on the others.   The difference in color is appropriate, as real cars would often have subtle paint variants as situations dictate (deliberate experiments; different workshops, batches, or timeframes; fading over time; etc).

The light 40-footer has just entered interchange.   The darker 40' and the 50' remain on home rails in Frankfort.

New Hope & Ivyland Caboose

This caboose is something you definitely will NEVER see for sale at a hobby shop!

Photo by George Bennett

The New Hope & Ivyland RR is a small short line in serving the SE Pennsylvania area near its namesake hometown. They used secondhand equipment obtained in roughshod condition, but made the best of what they had - including steam locos for revenue service long after most survivors were scrapped or relegated to museum and tourist duty.

Shazam - In the plastic!

A friend who used to work for the line sent me a photo as a commission reference. The matching model is a Proto 2000 Northeast caboose, formerly lettered for the Central RR of New Jersey.   Stripping the factory lettering was a pain!  I've become good at doing this but no matter what I tried, the pad=printed logos would not come off without destroying the surrounding paint!   So I devised a "color wash" technique to blend my closest red match onto the carbody, to rpeair the stipped areas and make it match the rest of the car without showing brush strokes, or resorting to a labor-intensive mask-and-airbrush affair.   It worked GREAT!

So, 90% of this ended up being custom painted by me, by hand (not with an airbrush).  The roof was painted with a rusty oxide color, and custom decals printed by me. (When my now-unobtanium ALPS MD-5000 printer dies, I think I might cry).

The boxcar is another custom job, painted by me for my home road, the Saint Canard Midland, in a backdated 1950-1960's scheme. The autorack with Beetle infestation is another custom car.

Finally, and of course, there’s always new discoveries in the world of Tyco, ID10T affairs notwithstanding.   Soon I hope to offer a detailed look at the following... in the meantime, can you find the following interesting buggers in the gallery?

- Silver Streak F9
- Star-Kist 40-footer
- PC 5628 Alco 430
- Northern Pacific, Great Northern "yellow" cabeese
- Reading derrick car

I'm Thinking of starting a "quick-take" collector's quip series when I find stuff, or to elaborate on favorites and the like.   But that's probably too much self-posturing bloviating that nobody gives a rip about.  If you're still here, why not tell me what you think?