The town of Santa Maria was built along the rail lines with the promise of rail service. My challenge is to provide both passenger and freight stations so these poor folks don't have to stand alongside the rails hoping a train will stop. The town council had generously donated land for both adjacent to the highway.

...where I hope to finish my to-do list of passenger and head-end cars, with some for me and a few for a couple of friends, too.  Some will be kitbashes and/or upgrades to existing cars, while others will be scratchbuilds, using commercially available parts.

Wayne

After a 15 year plus hiatus from this hobby I'm jumping back in.  No layout plans as yet, but I model the NWP, SP and WP in HO scale.  I'm old school, and plan to stay with straight DC, especially since my collection is mostly blue box Athearn, and some older Kato. My favorite part of the hobby is locomotive re-powering and detailing. When I finally build a layout it will be based upon operations in Northern California...mostly north of Sacramento and Santa Rosa. Glad to have found this forum...

These are the rules for our “do something, anything” challenge:

1.    Pick something that you want to do, build a kit, scratchbuild or kitbash something, rebuild a loco, finish off or start something new on your layout, paint a picture, do a photo challenge, document a railroad journey, just do something railroad-related, define what you are going to do, then document your progress to completion. If you have the wherewithal and want to do more than one project, bless your enthusiasm, you may do as many as you like assuming that you can finish them all.

2.    Start a thread in this forum, "Your Screen Name, 2021 do something challenge," and describe the project  in your first post. If you are doing more than one project, start separate threads for each one, adding a number or a name to keep them separate.

3.    You can open your thread at any time before the official starting date, which gives you enough time to decide on what you want to do. You are also free to enter a project at any time before the end of this challenge but please do not start posting progress reports until the starting date of the challenge.

4.     If your project is scale related, let us know what scale you are working in, it gives us a better prospective on what you are doing. As usual, provide us with lots of pictures of your progress.

5.    Because we never give anything of value away, this challenge is open to all registered members of the Big Blue Train Forum, including the staff. Let’s face it, we all need to work off those kinks of winter and do something that we want to do rather than have to do.
 
6.    This challenge is all about your project, you can have help, but you should do a substantial amount of the work yourself. You or someone else can take the photos. The intent is to get us all to do something we might normally just put off doing, or maybe not even think about doing.

7.    The challenge starts on April 1, and will run until the first day of Summer, June 20. A poll will open after that date, so that we can pick a winner of the challenge.

8.    As usual, there are no real prizes, just bragging rights and a certificate from Big Blue.

9.    Please post any questions or comments regarding this challenge only in this thread and we will attempt to resolve any issues here before the challenge starts. Do not post your challenges here, please start an individual new thread (see rule #2) for each one that you enter.

10.    And lastly, everybody should feel free to comment in someone’s challenge thread since everyone likes to know if what they’re heading down the right track, but please avoid hijacking the thread. After all, it is about the challenger’s project, not yours.

WPMA-19 working the South Shore Distributors warehouse.

Bruce

   

I was given this Proto2000 Mather stock car as a basket case a couple weeks ago

     

The original builder made a complete mess of the car, using Testors tube glue to assemble it, leaving some parts off and gluing some in the wrong place. I also found the car to be incredibly heavy. After some prying with an exacto-knife and a small screwdriver, I managed to get the roof, roofwalk and the doors off.

     

After that I found out why it was so heavy, 1 1/2 oz. of extra weight was glued inside. I guess it was added for better tracking? I also found that the original proto wheelsets were replaced with all plastic  ones, probably the source of the poor tracking. They went into the garbage.  

   

I scraped the glue off as best I could and started to replace/add the details. The original grab irons were MIA so I replaced the ladder grabs with some ladder stock, all other grabs were replaced with Tichy wire ones. 

   

I also removed the original lettering with a fiberglass brush. This is a pretty effective tool for this since the car sides are wood and the brush also scratched the wood sides a bit, adding some wood grain. 
The original roof walk was pretty much unusable with large globs of glue on it. I replaced it with a spare resin casting from the parts box. I also noticed that some of the side boards were broken so I fixed those with some styrene strip.  The original brake wheel and housing were badly damaged so I replaced those with tichy parts as well.

   

one of the last things I did before painting was to add the roofwalk end supports and check the coupler height. I used some metal wheelsets in the trucks and the car tracks perfectly now.

does anyone out there know if  there is or have been produced a rain cap for exhaust pipes  in ho ? if it might be known by another name this is what I'm after .
   
Jim

Can we get an idea of who is going to enter this challenge so I can put together a list here. Post your intentions in this thread please. You don't have to say what your project is just now, but you can. It would be nice to know who's in. If you think you will, but are not sure, just let us know with a "maybe". The last challenge, we had folks with good intentions until we got started and wound up with four. It would be great to have a few more than that this time.

I will post the rule thread in a few days, I'm just trying to drum up interest right now.



List of participants for our 2021 challenge:

• ezdays (2)
  
• nachoman (3)
  
• doctorwayne (2)
  
• tompm (3)
  
• e-paw (2)
  
• UP SD40-2
  
• jim currie
  
• Charlie B
  
• ngauger
  
• CNR5103
  

do any of you know what is going on with evergreen ? just tried to make an order  and on checkout it said they don't ship to arizona , tried calling and tried 3 different  options and they all say leave a message , then is said mailbox full try again later . any one else had that happen with them ?
Jim

Shore River's SD9  on it's way back to the interchange track with Conrail.

Bruce