01-29-2010, 03:11 PM
Gary S Wrote:...What did you do to install the beacon lights on them? What other mods did you do?...
The CF-7s are "out of the box". The beacon is from Athearn. I did install a ZIMO MX630 DCC decoder. Zimo is a small company from Vienna/Austria. They have the best motor handling I know required to tame the Athearn bronco motor. Only the beacon needs to be rewired to be attached to F3 with a resistor of 1kOhm.
They will get some weathering and at least break and MU hoses at the ends.
The round cab is without a beacon. I will have to check the documentation what would be the right road number to add one. A yellow LED is simple to install.
I did not install the A-Line motors in the Santa Fe CF-7 as they have all the same noise characteristics and run alone on the layout. This noise is not acceptable if the CF-7 are mixed with silent e.g. Altas engines. As I run the Florida Central CF-7 together with Altas CSX MP15DC, GP38-2 and Athearn CSX SW1500 those CF-7 engines had to be made silent to match the Atlas engines. They got the A-Line motors.
The Santa Fe engines have a history from the last layout. I did play around with the Indiana Railroad. Athearn has a nice painted CF-7 of the INRD (and GP38-2). One engine is fine but not enough. INRD hat the funny idea to run most of their CF-7 unchanged with the original ATSF paint and even ATSF road numbers. So I got some more CF-7 in ATSF paint for use on the INRD layout.
When I build this current layout the ATSF CF-7 were of no use anymore. That's when the idea of an alternate use of the Florida layout for ATSF CF-7 was born to keep the ATSF CF-7 running.
Gary S Wrote:... a photo of that boxcar in the background.
Here is a closeup of the boxcar in the background.
![[Image: bcar.jpg]](http://rubpeters.ru.funpic.de/work/bcar.jpg)
Reinhard