It's been three years since I started this in earnest, and many more since I started accumulating the rolling stock to do this, but the effort finally bore fruit this afternoon:
I had intended to upload it to the Forum's viewer rather than YouTube, but at 210MB it's too big. For now, this is on YouTube as an unlisted video--only those with the link can see it. I'll make a formal debut video for the public at large later on.
This should be the first and to date, only deliberate attempt to re-create the Amtrak Auto-Train in O-Gauge, at least as far as online video is concerned.
I started accumulating Auto-Train autoracks when MTH first released them, buying all the available 5-stripe road numbers as they came out, ending up with a Web search for the remaining road numbers, yielding results from Nicholas Smith Trains, Amherst Depot, and The Train Loft.
Then came the five-stripe (Phase IV) Superliner coaches. at first a four-car set from Willis Hobby, a two-car add-on from Jim's Train Shop just before his retirement, and a complete 6-piece set of the first run 5-stripe cars from a fellow in KS who saw my comment on a For-Sale forum post for the three-striped version. Found a matching transition sleeper at York, then a set of K-Line (Eastern Depot) and then Lionel (Public Delivery track) Superliners that ultimately were not used in this train. I could actually put a prototypical 16-Superliners together, but the autorack consist is supposed to be longer, and I don't have room to re-create the whole train.
After discovering the horrendous power draw of the nine Superliners I selected for the train, I endeavored to upgrade them to LED lighting, with the help of Gunrunnerjohn, and a lengthy thread on 300-LED strips, learned how to make my own constant-current circuit packs that I installed in the cars, greatly reducing their power requirements, and modernizing their lighting to boot. Even so, the whole train still draws 5.5-5.8 amps while running as seen in the video.
Along came the MTH Genesis diesels, of which I had mine custom-painted into Phase V by Jeff Sohn, as well as a couple of fictional CSX A-T auto carriers. The Genesis diesels were supplanted by a pair of WBB ones, since the MTH were power/dummy sets, and I needed more than two motors to pull the train. I added a dummy power kit to the WBB set.
The last bit of the puzzle was completing the decoration of the two "Phase V' auto carriers near the end of the train. I neglected to provide prototypical road numbers, and Jeff ran out of the custom lettering necessary for the "Auto Train" logo, so I located and finally started to use an ancient Roland vinyl-cutting machine with a built-in scanner to produce the proper road numbers, reporting marks, and the Auto-Train logo.
Putting it all together, I finally got some free time to check everything out and power it all up this afternoon. Prior to this my test-track layout had been out of service for two years, its single main track filled with this train, and all the locomotives + rolling stock I bought since assembling it there, waiting in boxes for their turn to run for the camera. That's a lot of patience...and procrastination on my part. I might've been able to get this done maybe a year sooner if I'd really pressed hard on it, but just the time needed to accumulate the rolling stock itself is probably why no one else has displayed a monster consist like this in 'O' that I know of. I haven't seen any in HO, and one was only demonstrated in 'N' this year when Kato released their AVC autoracks (and even that one was shorter than prototype, at 12 SL's + 16 autoracks, but needing three locos to pull).
---PCJ
