Hello everyone!  I've been away for a long time.  Sold my house in New Jersey, I think my last posts were photos of the dismantling of the first John Galt Line.  That was 5 to 6 years ago.  About 4 years ago I started a new version.  I'm even busier in retirement than I was while working!  I thought I'd just let you know that I've started over and see if I can post a couple photos.  

OK, my files are too large, will have to resize.  Can't do it right now as it will take me awhile to figure out.  And I have something else to do.  I will try one of my photos I posted long ago for now

       

It's been a long time since I posted anything regarding my woodworking challenges. A while back my son bought what he thought was a decent-looking bee whirligig for his wife's garden. What he got was not what he ordered, Amazon gave him full credit and he didn't have to return it to China. So he asked me if I couldn't make it look like a bee. I gave him a new head, a fatter body and put bearing in his wings, then a new paint job to make him look like Barry Bee. The first photo is what he got, the other two are what it looks like now:

OLD BEE:
   

NEW BEE:
   

   

Saying that I was reluctant to weather my cars is an understatement.  I was simply horrified at the idea to take a new car out of its box and make a mess of it with paints or chalks, not to mention a car made from a resin kit and painstakingly painted and lettered.  I had read magazine articles but couldn't decide to go ahead.  And I must admit that I didn't always like the the results I saw. 

After reading advice from Doctorwayne many times and seeing his nice weathered cars, I finally decided to go ahead.  I grabbed a car I had planned to modify and used an airbrush to follow Doctorwayne's advice.  For this first attempt, I did three different things :

• a light coat of  Red Brown acrylic paint all over the car so the lettering was not so obvious;
  
• a light coat of Earth color acrylic paint on the bottom of the car and trucks to simulate dust;
  
• a light coat of Black acrylic paint on the roof and top of ends to simulate soot.
  

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Nothing new from me this week.   YPMA-02 making a pick up of an empty refrigeration car at Flying Fish Brewery.

Bruce

   

https://nypost.com/2022/01/13/la-train-t...iners/amp/

nice headace for UP to sort out

Twenty years ago, the sight of a CNR 40' boxcar in Green Leaf livery brought back memories from my childhood and I was hooked back to HO modeling.  At that time I bought every CNR boxcar Athearn manufactured in BB kit.  With time passing and experience I discovered that those cars had a lot be desired and looked for better kits.  Finding a good basic kit for the 1937 AAR boxcar design is not easy though and finding one at 60$ us is not an option for me.

I had kitbashed an Athearn BB kit not so long ago for a freelanced road and I thought I could use another kit to model a CNR 40' boxcar.

The idea transformed itself into a project when I visited Exporail, the Canadian Train Museum in St-Constant, Quebec and saw a prototype of the car manufactured in 1939.  Here are some photos.

   

   

   

The Athearn BB kit for the 40' boxcar is pretty close to the 1937 AAR boxcar design and I thought that, with some modifications, I could get a nice model.  No intent here to get a perfect model of the prototype but something good enough.

I had a good candidate on hand and I was able to begin the journey.

   

If interested, follow me.

We have had more snow in the first week of the new year than the total for the last two years.  

WPMA-40 makes a pick up of an empty car they set out earlier in the week at Great Bay Foods.

Bruce

   

It’s a new year and it’s been a while since we’ve had a challenge of any kind. It’s time we thought about doing something along those lines.
 
It’s a new year and it’s been a very long time since we’ve had any kind of fundraiser to support Big Blue and it’s time we thought about doing something along those lines too.
 
Let’s talk about the challenge first, does anyone have any suggestions as to what we can do? Usually a build challenge of some sort, we’ve had photo challenges in the past, kitbashs and scratchbuilds have also done well. The last couple of, “Do something” challenges went well to, gives everyone a choice of what they like to do best. Think about it and come up with some ideas and let’s talk about it in this thread.
 
Now for the fundraiser, It’s been a long time since we’ve had any kind of fundraiser, be it an auction, sale, or just plain asking for contributions, but it takes money to keep Big Blue going and we’ve been good at keeping things reasonable and within our means. We do get an occasional donation and we thank you all for that, but the treasury is getting low, we have things coming up, some repeat every year, some we manage to arrange for two and three years. Each time the costs go up and we haven’t a clue how much each time until we start to review our options with our service provider. We have our SSL certificate up for renewal soon, we have our domain name, our hosting service and a few other things that come up that and we want to be prepared for. So we need some suggestions on how to get things going so we don’t have to grovel the last minute, We have been successful from the first day we split from Zealot, Mikey and I started out digging into our own pockets and thanks to all of you, we’ve not had to do that since. We promised from the get-go that there would be no advertising or sponsors, and we’ve kept our word and will continue to do so regardless.
 
Now, how do we keep things going, do we want to ask for stuff that we can auction off? Do we want to maybe decorate boxcars and auction them? (That hasn’t been too successful in the past.) Do we just want to point to the “donate” button and say, “have at it”? We’ve always liked to give back something if we can, that’s why the auctions, but we’ll do anything that works. So, how about posting some ideas here for a Big Blue Fundraiser….

We both sincerely thank you all for your participation and support here on Big Blue, we are proud that you've kept us around for all these years.

Don (ezdays) and MIkey (ngauger)

Pat did an update yesterday, the biggest change I see is that we can now group upload photos and even drag and drop. There is just one upload box, no more one-at-a-time.

Thank you, thank you Pat