Big Blue has inspired some purchases

[TMo]

The brass RS2 blew yet another decoder after I replaced the wiring harness, so that's going to end up on the display shelf as one of those "nice try, dumb@$$" projects.

However, my appetite for pushing the envelope remains, and I recently won an auction for an Intermountain SD40-2 chassis already with DCC. Apparently, the seller destroyed the shell somehow, and was willing to part with the chassis for what I think was a decent price considering that these have a really good running reputation. I had visions of getting it for a song until another buyer bid it up. Should be in my mailbox early this week, so I've been exploring options for shells. There are quite a few out there, but the reasonably inexpensive ones seem to have issues (missing pieces, missing handrails, bad paint jobs, etc.). I was either looking for a good foreign road lease job (say Union Pacific, Santa Fe, Chessie, Southern Pacific (I was flirting with a potential tunnel motor as well)), or a brand new looking off the production floor Conrail blue unit circa 1977 (that was the first year bought for that model, but it's close to my modeling timeframe, and I'm willing to stretch a little).

Ran into a dummy Athearn SD40-2 unit in Conrail blue that shows some promise - it's all there but has been weathered a good bit more than I want. Purchased it this morning, so a new project forthcoming fitting the shell and unweathering to nearly pristine.

I started into ideas for modeling the prototype and learned some things. The first Conrail buys of the Dash 2's had Flexicoil trucks rather than the standard HTC's, which was a spotting feature on those units. This unit does NOT have either the Flexicoils or the plow on the front (standard with the first units bought), so there's still some other stuff to research and purchase. More challenges!