I have been pretty busy lately down at the SLHRS depot.  Recently I have been working on moving some telephone poles that had been installed too close to the track.  These are pictures that I took from my mobile phone after putting the finishing touches in place.

This picture is taken looking east.

Now a view looking to the west.

And finally, a view of the south end of Oleum, where I have placed one of the models I featured previously.

Before completing the chalk weathering on the model I painted the metal parts with silver paint.  Over this I dry-brushed a rust color, adding heavy color where it would be likely for rust to form.  Once this had dried I used the chalk to blend in the areas and add even more rust color to the metal.

One of the other final steps was to fill in the small gap on the upper window by using white glue.  This had the effect of filling in the gap, but was able to be hidden by the weathering so that it was not noticeable.  Once all of this had dried I coated the entire model with Dullcote to protect all of the weathering.  On most models I would have done this before installing the windows as it take away the clarity, however in this case I wanted the windows to be slightly opaque so that you  were not able to see inside the building.

Once this building was complete I donated it to the San Leandro Historic Railway society to be used as a generic industrial building on our layout.  This building served as my “try piece” and landed me the job of working with another member to create the buildings for the Selby area of the layout (Selby, CA during the 1950′s contained a lead smelter and not far from there is the C&H sugar plant).  I will provide pictures of this current building and any future buildings in that area as they are built.

At the San Leandro Historic Railway Society’s winter show I won a Kato NW2 switcher from the raffle.  I am happy to say that this model turned out pretty well, and runs nicely on DC.  Unfortunately is was very difficult to install the decoder for DCC in this model, as no room is available inside of the model.  I was forced to mill out a portion of the weight under the hood to allow enough room for a N scale decoder from NCE. On the plus side the Kadee couplers I used to replace the horn-hook style couplers included with the model slid right into the existing pockets once I assembled them.

Two different options for the exhaust stacks were included, indicating the phase one and phase two (as built).  The detail parts were crisply molded and easily installed, with only minor enlarging of a couple of holes.  The directions were very clear and used diagrams of both the model and the parts sprues indicating the location for each part.  For the smaller parts duplicates were included in case of damage.  The directions stated that these parts could be just snapped into place, however I used Zap-A-Gap to make sure they would not fall out.  The lights use yellow LED’s, which I admit look a little strange – and I will be changing them out eventually.

Other than the difficulty in installing a DCC decoder into this model I would have given it top marks.

• Overall: 7
• Provided parts: 10
• Instructions: 10
• Value for price: 7
• Overall quality: 8

As I was on vacation over the Christmas holiday I did not have any time to work on any of my projects so I decided to post some pictures I took at the San Leandro Historic Railway Society while running some of my trains.

This picture shows my F7 A&B units from Proto 2000.  They were the first two models that I installed NCE decoders into, a really easy process as it was just a matter of removing the existing DC chip and plugging in the new decoder.

This picture shows a view of the same train heading across the top of the small helix heading towards Antelope.  Notice the weathered look of the boxcars and gondola in the picture.  This was done by drybrushing two different colors of paint, and then using pastel chalks to complete the affect.

Happy Holidays from RailroadRedux.

This last weekend was the annual winter Open House at the San Leandro Historic Railway Society.  Overall it was a really good show, with no major problems or mishaps.

Here is a picture of three of the members running trains in the Roseville Yard.

And here is JJ dispatching.

And here is the temporary display set up on the future home of the G&O railroad.