Return From Vacation

To those thinking I took a one way ticket for somewhere else, I'm still fine! And doing trains...

My vacations were an excellent occasion to build up my freight car rosters, including 12 new Accurail hopper, 6 Bowser hoppers, 1 50' P2K boxcar, 1 Walthers Airslide hopper and 4 Tichy tank cars.

Most had to be repainted or decalled. The job isn't completed, but only big part is now done. Future posts will cover the process of building this prototypical fleet.

I also had the occasion to discuss old CN wood chip roofless boxcar CN rostered until the early 80s in Eastern Canada with well-known author Richard Yaremko. He provided me with limited but valuable information on them and I feel like kitbashing them could be an interesting way of converting useless 40' boxcars I have and a stash of Microscale CN decals.

That saud, I bought 4 Intermountain CN Procor hoppers for cement service, an old Roundhouse Southern boxcar for cotton service at Dominion Textile and a Bachmann GE 45-Ton for Cement St. Lawrence.

Finally, I also received and tested my Rapido GMD1. Crisp details, out of this world slow speed control, realistic sound... and an annoying buzzing sound caused by Back EMF CV (it is the function that control the motor and make possible extremely precise slow speed operation). I contacted Dan from Rapido and he told me it was normal and they were working hard to reduce as much as possible this interference. If you run the loco without sound, it can be extremely annoying. If you run with sound, you almost don't hear it. On most videos on YouTube, you don't hear the buzz and nobody didn't write about in in review. I don't think we can call it a "defect" but it is still very annoying.

By the way, my GP9s and RS18s have their sound decoders installed and should arrive soon meaning I'll be able to finish painting and weathering them.

Lots of work for this fall as you can see. And I'm also in the process of painting 9 Warhammer 40000 tanks for a friend well into wargaming. I saw it as a good occasion to further improve my weathering and airbrushing skills.