Thanks Joe
And like Mark said Patrick was as good a layout builder as you can get.
He was very helpful on providing me with information.
Both on the forum and by emails.
I keep waiting to see if he starts another build.
Larry Sr.
Yes Larry, I would love to see Patrick build again!
A few months after I joined the Forum, Patrick held an open house at his home layout. I did not see the invitation here on the Forum. Patrick sent me an email, personally inviting me since I live a little over an hour away. Then local Forum members invited me to breakfast before going to Patrick’s. I just wanted to pass on how nice others were to me, fairly new at the time.
Those leds show up sooo bright on camera... 
.... 
......
.
Mikes last layout lacked something; he just wasn't sure what...
(also why he can't build inside anymore 
)
Mikes plateau, 48 hours from now 
(viewed from the floor naturally ....I meant too ask how many beers it took to put you there for taking the brace shots 
)
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Adriatic posted:Those leds show up sooo bright on camera...
Mikes last layout lacked something; he just wasn't sure what...
(also why he can't build inside anymore
Mikes plateau, 48 hours from now
(viewed from the floor naturally
LOL
I ran my Crazy Eight Loco on the toy micro layout pulling the gondola of dice, operating lotto boxcar and Joker caboose while contemplating a shortened "go-fish-belly-flat" and Jenga load in a short bulkhead flat or as load cribbing under... say....a.. 🤔
...cribbage board load; girder style; 2 boards on edge...?
mike g. posted:Hi Guys, I am glad you like the airfield! Lee don't worry there will be a chopper or 2 out there, maybe even more! Planes for sure!
Matt, Carl, and Dave I too have flown into airstrips like this also! I am thinking about raising the back so it slops down towards the front to make it easier for people to see! Any thoughts?
Slope it a few degrees. I hate landing on a hill.
Mike - the air strip is a neat idea. You have been working behind the scenes. Lighting is very cool. Air strips on the edge of a cliff are ok on takeoff......
Oh yes Matt, a few degrees slope is all I was thinking. Of course if it is steeper that will help slow down Mikes planes if they are landing toward that two dimensional runway extension I mentioned last evening! LOL
Adriatic posted:Those leds show up sooo bright on camera...
Mikes last layout lacked something; he just wasn't sure what...
(also why he can't build inside anymore
Mikes plateau, 48 hours from now
(viewed from the floor naturally
For those of us who are married, this is our wives' greatest fear. LOL
decoynh posted:Slope it a few degrees. I hate landing on a hill.
Landing IN a hill is even worse, I wot. ;-)
Mitch
Arnold D. Cribari posted:Adriatic posted:Those leds show up sooo bright on camera...
Mikes last layout lacked something; he just wasn't sure what...
(also why he can't build inside anymore
Mikes plateau, 48 hours from now
(viewed from the floor naturally
For those of us who are married, this is our wives' greatest fear. LOL
LOL
looking good Mike !!
just passing by...
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mike g. posted:Went out and played alittle in the train room today! Here are a few pictures of my day!
Looks great, Mike! Like flying into Charleston, WV. Or you can put an ocean scene on the wall and turn it into a carrier flight deck. What that has to do with trains is anyone's guess.
As promised earlier this week, here is an orange Baby Ruth boxcar turned into my baby grandson's "first Christmas" car.
When he gets a little older I'll make an entire train set for him.
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That car is super, Pete!! Such a great photograph of your grandson on it as well!!
Thanks, Mark! My daughter had to do 3 photo shoots in his elf outfit to get him to sit still long enough.
I know Pete! Photographs like that aren’t by accident! LOL
You want inclines on your runway, try flying into Steamboat Springs, CO, it's a significant grade! It's bad enough that you virtually always land uphill regardless of the wind and take off downhill for the same reason. I flew in there a few times years ago, interesting place.
There you go Mike! John has the prototype!! Is that a railroad I see winding off in the distance??
Well last night I was able to install my weathered (not finished) and lighted Atlas O Switch Tower:
Also have a lot of the Ready Grass Down, just missing a few more areas and then adding some demension to the grass in some areas and gravel in others. Here is a shot I took this morning. (Bottom: Legacy Southern Heavy Mikado, Top: Lionel Legacy H10 Western Allegheny:
Still have a lot of work ahead of me but things are definitely coming together nicely.
Thanks!
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HCSader73 posted:As promised earlier this week, here is an orange Baby Ruth boxcar turned into my baby grandson's "first Christmas" car.
When he gets a little older I'll make an entire train set for him.
Pete, you MUST tell us other OGR grandpas/opas/farfars or whatever, HOW DID YOU DO IT?
It's FANTASTIC.
HCSader73 posted:mike g. posted:Went out and played alittle in the train room today! Here are a few pictures of my day!
Looks great, Mike! Like flying into Charleston, WV. Or you can put an ocean scene on the wall and turn it into a carrier flight deck. What that has to do with trains is anyone's guess.
Yeager Airport, Charleston, West Virginia:
They blasted 2 mountain tops to fill the hollow between them to make Yeager, or so I was told.
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Trestle coming along
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Daniel, The switch tower looks great! Very handsome H10 and Mike as well!
Pete, You definitely found the prototype for Mike G.'s airport!!!
Joe, that trestle is really looking good! What are the dimensions of the timbers?
Pingman posted:HCSader73 posted:As promised earlier this week, here is an orange Baby Ruth boxcar turned into my baby grandson's "first Christmas" car.
When he gets a little older I'll make an entire train set for him.
Pete, you MUST tell us other OGR grandpas/opas/farfars or whatever, HOW DID YOU DO IT?
It's FANTASTIC.
Thanks, Carl. That's very kind of you. The car is really an accumulation of many small easy steps. If you're willing to read it, I'll write it:
PREP WORK: First off, you take a relatively useless boxcar, like an orange colored Baby Ruth car (sold at York for $3 on some tables) and take it completely apart, wheels, trucks, flatbed, doors, everything. Then get it clean, like new clean. Some guys use soft scrub detergent . I use vinegar with baking soda and a toothbrush. Just make sure you rinse the surfaces thoroughly from the white powdery residue left by the baking soda.If there is any rust on the metal, give it a bath overnight in Evaporust before cleaning.
PAINTING THE PLASTIC BOXCAR: Getting the car to a convincing pure white will take 2 coats of very flat primer followed by 2 passes with a high gloss enamel. Paint the inside of the boxcar before beginning to paint the outside. With the flat primer you can spray about a foot out. With the high gloss you'll want to spray from a foot and a half or so, let it dry and get hard overnight, and then do it again. You can't rush it. Let the paint cure and get hard. This is a good way NOT to gunk up all the little ridges on the car with enamel paint. Spray too close and it will become a dripping mess. Once the boxcar is white to your satisfaction, hand paint the roof the color of your choice. It took me 4 passes to get the roof right so that the white did not bleed through. The doors will need to be hand painted as well, after they have been hit with the very flat primer coats. You can either paint the doors gloss white or an accent color. Make sure the door slides do not get painted shut. When each coat is dry use a very small screw driver blade repeatedly to pry the door slides apart and scrape off excess paint. On to the roof! I used Testor enamel for the roof, painting it by hand. It required 4 passes, each time drying completely before repainting.The result is worth the extra effort.
PAINTING THE FRAME AND TRUCKS: Then address the metal flatbed. It is black. Give it one hit of the flat white primer, let it cure, then hit it again with the high gloss red enamel. I use a cardboard painting box with a heavy paper clip hanging from a horizontal string. The piece being painted is suspended from the paper clip, and it is easy to get at all surfaces from all angles. Finally you paint the trucks. Take the brackets off and remove the axles from the truck sides; then take the wheels off the axles. I simply spray painted the truck sides with the red gloss, but I was wrong. I should have hit them first with the flat white so the tone of the red paint on the truck sides would be the same as the roof. After giving the wheels a good cleaning with my dremel tool, I hand painted each wheel side with a white gloss enamel.
MAKING THE DECALS: If you don't know how to edit photos with a program like Photoshop or Gimp, ask someone for help. Your objective is to make a transparency of a picture you like. To make a transparency, saved as a GIF or a bitmap (BMP) file, you will have to erase some of the background pixels with your photo editor. This is what I did with the holly frame. I found the holly frame as a public domain photo JPEG file. I erased its white background to make it transparent, and added the First Merry Christmas text in green and red. Then I resized the transparent holly frame, making it a little bigger to accommodate the photo of my grandson. WARNING: Do not try to take photos of your grandchild yourself. They are shifty, squirmy, inquisitive little things and only sit still when fast asleep. Let your son/daughter spend a few hours trying to get one decent face shot. Once you get the desired photo of your grandchild, crop it to fit into the holly frame, and insert it into the holly frame as a new layer. Then merge visible layers and save as a GIF or BMP file.Now comes the fun part.
Go on Amazon and buy some water-slide decal paper for laserjet color printers. Print the finished holly frames with text and the photo of your grandchild onto the warer-slide decal paper. Cut to the image edges, submerge it in tepid water, and then slide it into place on the side of the boxcar. Once the decals are dry and set, brush gently with a lacquer to seal them in place.
Voila! You have a Christmas rail car of your grandchild!
Pete, What a great idea.... Well done !
Came down with a wicked cold yesterday, so to keep my mind off the symptoms, decided to take out two Atlas O WM auto box cars and do some weathering. One is almost done, still working on the other.... Really just want them to look like moderate in use service, not rust buckets... Have to excuse the first two photos, decided to try and take them outside on the deck but the sun was already dropping below the trees.
Bought these here on the OGR forum, unfortunately, the seller conveniently didn't mention the zinc pest rot in all the ladders, grab irons, stirrups and wheel trucks... Got the wheel trucks fixed. Managed to pick up (4) suitable boxcar ladders at the show last weekend, so I am painting them to match, and will install them after the weathering is done. They'll probably go back into service without stirrups and grab irons....
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Pete, Those are great instructions. Yes I can see what you are saying about erasing the background in GIMP. That would be a job for my daughter or son-in-law, the artist pair. The other daughter is a musician and her husband is a videographer/editor. The best advice I see here is: let your daughter r son take the photograph! And we don't even have grandchildren; I just remember trying to get our girls to hold still for my wife when I was in my late 30s to 40. It was nearly impossible wasting film. At least today you can blow away a ton of free digital reject photographs. 
Chris, Those are great looking cars. Of course you started with the best; Western Maryland round herald and simply 'WM'. Your advice makes sense. I wasn't expecting to see zinc rot on these. Bummer for that.
Brian, Thanks for stopping by! I am glad you liked your visit! LOL
Pete, I was thinking about putting a backdrop of an airport, but then I seen the picture John put up and I just might go that way! Or maybe the one you put up! On another note, Great job on the Christmas Car!
John, I really like it! Maybe I will model that area and cut my airfield down from 2 runways to just one!
Daniel, looks good!
Alabama Joe, Nice work on the trestle!
Chris wonderful work! Looks very nice and will look great on the layout!
Pete, big THANK YOU!!! Excellent directions, though I have a bit to learn in the decal making phase of the operation.
Thanks Mark, I agree, they are really nice looking WM cars. If I had the Atlas Item #'s I would give them to you and tell you to beware... The road numbers on the cars are 30000 series, I ended up with 30004 & 30006. My understanding is that the zinc pest on the diecast parts probably affected cars assembled in the same batches. Not sure how to know that, except maybe go back in the historical product delivery schedules for Atlas where they used to announce shipments coming over. I went back tonight and did another wash with a slightly different color, so I'll put some more photos up tomorrow after they dry and I put them on the layout.
Didn't feel like taking the air brush out, so I did all this with acrylic paint washes and made sure the wash had about 50% alcohol/ 50% water so it would lay down smoothly on the surface.
My only other complaint/warning about these AUTOMOBILE BOXCARS is the doors don't open, not a huge deal breaker, but I didn't realize when I bought them that Atlas O was making premium cars with doors that were molded into the car body and "locked shut".
It was a good way to spend the day, work on improving my weathering skills on some cars I didn't pay all that much for.
Continuing with my red/green/silver color scheme for the Christmas tree layout, put first couple of coats on the MPC era 9224 horse corral.
Tested my Lionel signals: 151, 153, and 154--good news everything in working order, though the OBs are more sleeves with parts than boxes at this stage. Will probably put them on the bay.
Continuing to test run and make repairs where necessary to engines and rolling stock.
Need to p/u some super glue to complete the "Apples55 Span" Christmas decorations.
`
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Red and Green for Christmas! Great choice!
chris a posted:Pete, What a great idea.... Well done !
Came down with a wicked cold yesterday, so to keep my mind off the symptoms, decided to take out two Atlas O WM auto box cars and do some weathering. One is almost done, still working on the other.... Really just want them to look like moderate in use service, not rust buckets... Have to excuse the first two photos, decided to try and take them outside on the deck but the sun was already dropping below the trees.
Bought these here on the OGR forum, unfortunately, the seller conveniently didn't mention the zinc pest rot in all the ladders, grab irons, stirrups and wheel trucks... Got the wheel trucks fixed. Managed to pick up (4) suitable boxcar ladders at the show last weekend, so I am painting them to match, and will install them after the weathering is done. They'll probably go back into service without stirrups and grab irons....
Thanks a lot, Chris!
Sorry about the cold, but love the cure! The weathering looks great!
Mark Boyce posted:Pete, Those are great instructions. Yes I can see what you are saying about erasing the background in GIMP. That would be a job for my daughter or son-in-law, the artist pair. The other daughter is a musician and her husband is a videographer/editor. The best advice I see here is: let your daughter r son take the photograph! And we don't even have grandchildren; I just remember trying to get our girls to hold still for my wife when I was in my late 30s to 40. It was nearly impossible wasting film. At least today you can blow away a ton of free digital reject photographs.
Chris, Those are great looking cars.
Mark, making the images for decals is not hard. Like most things it just takes some getting used to. The biggest obstacle is getting proficient at a specific photo editing program, like Adobe's Photoshop, or GIMP freeware. Only when you know your way around the program can your artistic skills take flight.
If anyone on this forum needs help making a GIF or BMP file out of a photograph or JPEG image they found online just email it to me and I will make a transparency for you. Then you can make your own decals.
Pingman posted:Pete, big THANK YOU!!! Excellent directions, though I have a bit to learn in the decal making phase of the operation.
You're very welcome, Carl. It is fun to learn new skills. Keeps the brain young.
If you need help making a decal, you can email the image to me and I'll make it into a transparency for you.
Thank you, Pete!! Yes there is always a learning curve with software, then it becomes easy!
Pete, That's a great offer! Only here on this forum would you find people like you willing to help! I hope the offer is still there when the time comes for me!
mike g. posted:Pete, That's a great offer! Only here on this forum would you find people like you willing to help! I hope the offer is still there when the time comes for me!
So true, Mike! Seems I recall you have contributed in a similar way! Good job!
mike g. posted:Pete, That's a great offer! Only here on this forum would you find people like you willing to help! I hope the offer is still there when the time comes for me!
Absolutely, Mike! Why not make a 5/11 Bn O Batt car?
