Actually it might be. It all boils down to whether your load will fit. This 'study' is what happens visually when you lengthen a T&P 931 by a single section. I think it does look a bit better, but now I want to see what adding yet another section does for its overall form.
And to see this train in motion, head over to my "Youtube Channel" 😄
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FaCD-1TETNI
Water tanks of this style are ubiquitous in the railway towns of central Mexico. This prototype is in Oaxaca.
They vary considerably in details. I have chosen to model an example that supports a remote spigot and employs much rougher stonework.
All jokes aside, there are those among 'collectors' and among 'modellers' who won't like what I'm doing. I know it, and after you read this post, you'll know it too,
Some folks frankly find the mutilation (stripping & repainting) of collectibles a tad off-putting. And a different camp of folks - hobbyists the lot - will take umbrage with my tally of rivets, farcical reporting marks, and amateurish technique. Sadly for them, I enjoy what I do and am mostly content with how I do it so in that vein...
TRIGGER WARNING
Here is my rather simplistic method of "masking" my trucks for painting.
Only so much planning can go into the creative process. The bulk of it is Kinetic Fever Dream. I ordered a set of Gorre & Daphetid decals from K4decals.com along with some ATSF. That was all it took. Suddenly Tribble Colorado became a dusty end-of-the-line town on one of the GD's lesser modeled branches. Here we see former PRR gondola #805 has been given a quick re-stencil and pressed into service. The crew of extra #51 has left it here for a brief moment while they push a tank car onto the siding in the background. The GD station is inspired by (or blatantly plagiarized from) an ATSF branchline design.
Even a micro-sized or unfinished pike can still provide reasonable operations and the easiest way to get started is the Inglenook Sidings puzzle. I've just completed the oval as described in a previous post and, while I haven't added the Fiddle Yard yet, I can still enjoy shunting a few cars thanks to this simplest of switching puzzles.
I put eight cars on the layout in groups of five and three. Then I shuffle them and randomly select an ordered group of five to comprise my train. Then all that's left to do is assemble the cut. Each session fills a fun half hour.
I use google sheets and select eight cars for the session. Then I simply shuffle their order using the randomize function. The first five (in order) is what my finished train should look like.
A note on the table: The notes that include "former" are cars I intend to repaint and letter in the near future. At that point the "MARKS" column will have their new road name and number.
You gotta go S-L-O-W if you hope to operate in a prototypical fashion. That is NOT something you can normally coax out of a Gilbert 300AC. Rightly so. The 4-4-2 Atlantic was an early passenger thoroughbred based on a prototype that flew the rails, pulling named consists on tight schedules and the AF model is true to the prototype.
So what did I do to achieve a low-end speed of under 11 scale MPH out of mine? Two things actually. 80% of my results come from a Port Lines "Scale Speed" Can Motor Conversion. It's an easy to install upgrade to performance for only $39 (DC operation). The other 20% comes from using a DC 'pulse' throttle - which in my case simply means a 50¢ schottky diode between one terminal of my Lionel Type "R" and my track.
With these two bits of hardware (and some clean track) it takes the Atlantic 17 seconds to crawl over fifty inches!
Since one of my goals is to eek out some level of Operation (with a capital "O") on the new pike, I've come up with a solution to hands-near uncoupling for any spot I need to set out a car... The Knuckle Buster™ Manual Uncoupling Tool.
