I tend to "over think" projects way too much. I need to have a pretty "firm idea" of where I am going, how to do it and what will be the end results. This makes my "projects" become rather long, drawn out affairs. Case in point. A few years ago, I purchased a Williams E7 AA set decorated for the Maine Central (the road name I mainly model). I knew I wanted to make them TMCC controllable and purchased a ERR Cruise Commander for the power unit. Installing it and getting the engine up and running on the layout was pretty straight forward. Leaning more so to 3RS, I felt the engine was lacking the visual detail that I wanted and the pair was relegated to my staging yard to do duty pulling a thru train from one yard to another when needed. After some time, I saw the possiblities of doing some 3RS upgrades to the pair to make them more to my liking. In mind, I was thinking fixed pilots, chassis mounting the truck mounted ladders, KD couplers, narrowing the "fat" truck side frames and lowering the fuel tank. I received some guidance from the forum and started to draft my plans and work began. Almost immediately I was questioning myself on how was I going to do this or that. Work would stop at that point and the thinking, dreaming and research would begin. The project would be removed from my workbench until such time as I had the questions answered to my satisfaction. This continued for over a year on this project. A few months or so ago, I was nearing the completion of the changes and I was starting to toy with the idea of making the dummy powered. Research started and I was looking for the older Williams 6 wheel power truck/motor sets but could not locate them readily. Work again had stopped until I could solve this problem. About a month or so ago I saw a listing on the buy/sell form for a pair of Williams E7's that were both powered, had sound (which I do not use) and had been upgraded to TMCC. A deal was made and I recently picked the engines up from the forum member at this past York. Two days after getting back home, The motors, trucks and electronics were transplanted into my dummy. Final assembly of the cabs and chassis took about a week and finally the engines took their place on the layout.They turned out well enough that they will see somewhat regular duty both as single and MU units. In this case, taking my "old sweet time" got me the results I wanted.
As an aside, I was able to sell the donor engines, a stunning pair of silver Burlington's on the forum for someone else to enjoy.
