Buy anything cool lately?

This past week I took delivery of two locomotives.

One of them decidedly lightweight, the other...not so much.

One quite detailed, the other, not so much.

Enough with the vagueness, on to the hardware. Descriptive text references the photo above.

Back two posts when I talked about a group of Lima European freight cars I acquired off Ebay, somewhere under the part where I rambled on about the G-scale Marklin car I received in error, I mentioned maybe looking for one of Lima's diesel locomotives, perhaps a British Rail Class 33 or the French SNCF BB-67400 diesel they modeled. Well, one of each turned up a couple of weeks ago from the same seller, not as a buy-it-now entry but a regular auction. Somebody took an interest in the BB-67400, but the BR Class 33 sat unloved for the entire auction at its starting price of just under $25 with no bids (though a number of people were watching it), till I put in a bid and won it at the starting price. Shipping from MN was about the same as the selling price, but at a total price of 49.50, it cost less than the shipping alone had I got it from a UK seller

Nice shade of blue there, but I believe the actual British Railways scheme was a noticeably darker shade of "rail blue" (or Monastral blue according to Wikipedia) You might notice after looking at prototype photos, this model seems uncharacteristically chunky--it appears Lima stretched the Class 33's proportions to fit an existing chassis, or some other reason for freelancing the 33's proportions.

Now for the elephant in the room. This is a 2-rail unit, as you can see by this truck closeup. I thought long and hard about what it would take to make this locomotive 3-rail compatible before pulling the trigger on this auction. I've figured out something for the freight and passenger cars, but the locomotive is another ball of wax entirely. One aspect of this unit that may save me is that the wheelsets on this locomotive aren't exactly finescale. I've tilted the unit up on its side and posed a Weaver 2-rail truck next to it to demonstrate the difference. By the way, these truck sideframes aren't even remotely accurate for a Class 33, they're re-used from some other Lima model. Someone did devise a 3D printed version of an accurate truck sideframe for these, but the trucks would still have the incorrect wheelbase and spacing relative to the body Also I'm not a UK finescale modeler so neener neener .

So, not "I wanna be Proto:48"- scale, but not quite pizza-cutters either (we won't talk about those couplers). Perched atop the tubular rail of my test track, these wheels did resist token attempts to shove them sideways off the railheads, which is more than I can say for the Weaver truck

So as mentioned before, my mad plan for this unit is to convert it to 3-rail operation -- the twist being that I'll be using as much of the original chassis and running gear as possible, instead of grafting an entire Williams or Lionel chassis into the Lima shell (the latter described in this forum back in a 2012 post ). The rest of the re-engineering would consist of devising a mount for a pair of pickup rollers on the non-powered truck and mounting a basic E-unit between these improvised pickups and the motor, and if this proves successful, sticking a TMCC board in there, as there is plenty of empty space inside this cavernous body shell.

There are kits to install a CD drive motor in-place of the ring-field open-frame motor inside (I don't yet know it if works, but the loco shows little evidence of being run), giving you smoother quieter operation, at the expense of a narrower range of operating voltage -- 12 volts is the most I've heard of for these motors, and most of the ones out in the wild are only 6v, so whomever is offering the upgrade kit with a 12v motor really had to scrounge for them.

Now for the heavy beast. I have a lot less to say about this one since they've been made before, but no one is really talking about this so I decided to say something about mine. Here's MTH's newly-released Premier UP Challenger:

This was announced way earlier than expected -- I was keeping tabs on the real 3985 being restored at the RRHMA's facility in Silvis, IL, and was planning on getting a scale Challenger (I have a Lionmaster one) to go with my restoration-edition Big Boy when MTH announced theirs well before I expected them to. Well, it would be at least half a year before delivery so I put in a pre-order with Mr Muffins in June 2023. Much to my surprise, the locomotives arrived early in February, my invoice arrived 2/19, (paid the same day), and it arrived 2/24. I only got to take photos today in the fading late-afternoon light, so I had to use my phone, which is a bit better at low-light shots then my old Canon SX100 in the background (it's batteries collapsed before I could take any photos anyway)