Athearn Rotary Snowplow

[doctorwayne]

Since I have a few stalled projects on my workbench, a few more on the layout, and a whole pile of them in temporary storage, I thought that it might be a good idea to start another one.

Some time ago, can't recall if it was at the now-defunct LHS or perhaps a train show, I picked up an Athearn kit for their rotary snowplow.  Lettered for Great Northern, it was painted boxcar red, and looked pretty bland.  I had, at that time, intended to make it into an EG&E plow, (I owned one previously, but sold it - pretty-much "stock" - when I back-dated my layout. 
I needed a tender to go with the plow (the original one never had one) and since I had most of a Monogram UP Big Boy in my supply of "stuff", I thought that the tender from it would be a good one for the plow.

However, it was a centipede type, and looked a bit too long for this new role, so I chopped it down to a more reasonable size.

Well, some other stuff came up, and this project, too, was set aside. 

While looking for something else, I came across the box containing the plow kit and the butchered tender, and for some reason, it seemed to be a good idea to get back to working on it. 

I neglected to take any photos at the beginning, so the shortened tender is as I recently found it...



....I'll tidy-up the cistern deck, and fabricate an oil tank to fill-in the coal bunker area.  I'll also re-work the underbody to accept Athearn 6-wheel trucks, and add handrails and other details.

Here's the underbody for the plow...



As you can see, I had to cut away some areas of the sidesills to allow room for handrails beside the plow's access doors, so the underbody is a bit too flexible.  I cured that issue by constructing a couple of bulkheads inside the bodyshell, adding .125"x.188" styrene strip to the bottom of each, then drilled and tapped them for 1-72 screws, which will secure the body and underbody together....



Detail work on the plow itself has begun, with piano wire handrails alongside all access doors, and Tichy phosphor-bronze drop-style grabirons in place of the original cast-in-place ones.....





The back end looks a bit too high to me, and the underbody a bit scrawny, too, so I'll have to see what can be done. 
The underbody of the tender needs to be modified or replaced in order to get the trucks in their proper positions, too, but that shouldn't be too much of an issue....



Supposedly, the Athearn plow is a fairly good representation of four snowplows, built by LIMA in 1949-50 - 1 for the Rock Island, 1 for Soo Line, and two for U.P. 
From the photos I've seen of the U.P. ones, they do look similar to the Athearn model, while mine will be almost identical, but built in the late '30s - the EG&E was always in the forefront of technological advances...well, that's my story of things, anyway.


While pretty-well all of my MoW equipment is boxcar red and lettered rather plainly... 





....I think that the plow and tender will be predominantly black, and with the bolder lettering style of more modern equipment, perhaps like this...
 


...or maybe this...



...or maybe even this...



For now, yet to be decided.

Wayne