Monday Mountain thread

[E7]

Unless you have someone or some entity around to enforce your commitment, sooner or later someone is going to come along and say why are we displaying all this crap, and away it goes. Museums have de-acquisition sales, so given enough time, adios.

Most people tend to not take care of stuff they get gratis, and if your luck is like mine, you will give it to the reincarnation of Gomez Adams!

[bob turner]

The California State museum is a possibility. They are currentlyout of space, but they have the real 4294 and Tom Sefton's Lobaugh AC-8 on display. My models are easily in the same class as Tom's, and could be an interpretive exhibit.

[bob turner]

This is my very first scratchbuilt model locomotive. Its boiler is a hunk of steel exhaust pipe. I actually got better as time went on - this one is 30 years old and runs like a watch!



It would look good in Sacramento, I think.

Ego - er, opinion.

[E7]

Looks good to me. Doesn't matter so much what it was, as what it is. I'll bet it doesn't dent easily!

[R.K. Maroon]

Bob, your fleet of cab-forwards is indeed a worthy collection. I acquired as many of Fred Bradley's GM&O models as I could because I thought they should be kept together instead flung to the eBay winds. I know of a couple of other modelers with similar focused collections, and it would be great if they could be kept together too. It is obviously not easy to make this happen in a meaningful way, and I agree with the notion expressed earlier that time scatters all. I remember seeing some crude cardstock O-scale models in the display cases lining the halls in the basement of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. You walked past them upon leaving the coal mine. This was 1980 and I thought -- "gee, how crude". But they were probably a gift from a modeler in 1930's when they were the state of the art. I wonder if they are still there, and if so I would be shocked (but pleased).

My own collection is really just a hodge-podge, so I harbor no illusions that there is any value in thinking they need to be kept together. That makes it easy to think about what happens down the road. My core philosophy is based in the notion that models that can run should run, so I will mostly likely be giving my models away someday to anybody that promises to get them out at least once a year and run them. But alas, that won't last long either.

I guess we're left with having fun while we can. *sigh* -- Hey, anybody want to go run some trains?

Jim

[rogruth]

Jim,
I remember those models at the Museum of Science and Industry.
My reaction was different from yours.I visited there in the summers
of 1948 through 1952 and thought how nice those models were compared
to the card-stock stuff I was making.
I think we are talking about the same models.

[ScaleCraft]

Mountain. Probably the most I ever paid for any 0 loco, two or three rail....125? 150? something like that.

[bob turner]

You get all the good deals.

[ScaleCraft]

ka-ka occurs, right?
I do not have the money to buy high priced stuff, which is why I started in doorstops all those decades ago.
I mean, my SC Hudson was 15 or 20 bucks...the GM Mountain was 20-25 or somewhere in there (and what a job....put together with a hammer, painted with a brush, mantletop display for decades and decades..all the small detail parts pitched...wires from field wound motor never, ever soldered to anything).
Two Thomas 0-4-0's for free (cut up to make a 2-4-4-2 or 0-4-4-0 and never finished)...Bob Hall fixed one for me, and I gave him the other for the work.
The fun part was making the short NP cabooses from Walthers NYC (?) cabooses with a Lionel cupola..paint and decals.....and they are presentable....have at least three, with parts to make a fourth.

[rogruth]

Dave,

You apparently do with your trains what I like to do---have fun.
We do it a little differently but we still do what it is all about, having fun.

[R.K. Maroon]

I remember those models at the Museum of Science and Industry. My reaction was different from yours.I visited there in the summers
of 1948 through 1952 and thought how nice those models were compared to the card-stock stuff I was making

Roger, that's a great memory. It shows the difference in perceiving something only skin-deep (me at the time) versus having a direct understanding of how it was made and the personal skill and effort therein (you at the time). Somebody posted in the "History of O-Scale Book" thread that nobody would ever go backwards from today's finely detailed models. I didn't comment but it only takes a little familiarity with this forum to know that many of us can indeed appreciate a model that bears the marks of a single modeler's skill and toil even if it doesn't measure up rivet-to-rivet with a modern model.

Mountain

Brass boiler, correct? My understanding is that the NYC Hudson and ATSF Mikado were cast boilers (except for the first year or two of the Hudsons), but the other ScaleCraft locomotives all had brass boilers. Please correct me if I am mistaken.

Arthur Hayes and I were discussing this fact not long ago: Between Lobaugh and ScaleCraft, there were at least five SP locomotives offered as production models before the war. No other western railroad comes close. Does anybody have any theories about this? So many others that could have been offered.

Jim

[ScaleCraft]

Mountain

Brass boiler, correct? My understanding is that the NYC Hudson and ATSF Mikado were cast boilers (except for the first year or two of the Hudsons), but the other ScaleCraft locomotives all had brass boilers. Please correct me if I am mistaken.

Arthur Hayes and I were discussing this fact not long ago: Between Lobaugh and ScaleCraft, there were at least five SP locomotives offered as production models before the war. No other western railroad comes close. Does anybody have any theories about this? So many others that could have been offered.

Jim

hmm..been a lot of years since I had the boiler off the chassis. I do not remember. It IS heavy..at least as heavy as the Hudson.
Funny about prototypes.
SP seemed to have good coverage....PRR had a few..but seems everybody made K4's. And a lot of GG1's.
How many specific Santa Fe steamers were made pre-war?
I know I was glad to find mine.

Twin sand domes and all.

[ScaleCraft]

I THINK I drilled and filed out the front cab windows on this Mikado. I can't remember for sure, but I thought the front was solid. I do the same on the Varney Half Zero steamers I rebuild.
"Blow-Smoke" shows the Mikados were released in spring of 1941. They certainly aren't in earlier catalogs.

SC had the Mountain and the P-13 Pacific in SP.

[rogruth]

Jim,

Please realize that I do not remember specifics about those models, only that I was impressed with what I saw.
When I visited the museum the first hour was at the M&SF layout and then to see more of the museum.
My second favorite exhibit was the childbirth and genetics display.One of the most popular at that time was
finding the radio active frogs in a case by moving a Geiger counter probe over the. Kids would wait in line
for a long time to do this. I was too impatient to wait to hear the beeps. Remember that the A-bomb had
been used only three years earlier and there was a lot of interest.

[R.K. Maroon]

I hear through the grapevine that Bob and a friend are flying a tail-dragger from Florida to California this week. It's been extremely hot in the Southwestern desert, so that has to be a lot of fun to be flying in. Besides the personal (dis)comfort issue, there is also the concern with lift on the wings.

But, just so Bob doesn't think the forum dies without him, here is a Mountain for the week:









More on this guy later, but I just wanted to get something posted up.
Jim