City of Miami - 3
5: Finished assembly of the weight kit.
5
building a jigsaw puzzle. Once you have the layout of the metal
parts figured out, then you glue them down using the glue
that comes with the kits. Mostly, they fit between the interior
kit and the floor of the car, but some parts are stuck down in
undercarriage detail cavities, or up in interior kit detail cavities.
I was testing some other cars at the Suncoast Model Railroad
Club (
and found out that many clubs
don’t want plastic wheelsets running on their layout. In fact,
many DCC based layout clubs now forbid non metal wheelsets!
This started a search for alternatives. I took some of the cars
into a local model train store and we tried several different
types of wheelsets, all to no avail. I was pricing entire trucks
from several places and the price to re-wheel all of both trains
was starting to get expensive.
While I was examining alternative ways to do this, finally it hit
me. I e-mailed the folks at Adair Shops and asked them what
they used for metal wheelsets on their IHC cars. They said that
they used either the 920-
21258 Proto 2000 wheelsets
or Intermountain 40050
wheels. (In the defense of
the local shop I had tried to
find wheelsets in, he had
neither type in stock when
we were trying different
wheelsets that day).
Lettering
To get the lettering I needed
for the car names that were
not available, I scanned the
lettering on the sides of the
cars using a flatbed scanner and built decals. Using the extra
cars I had bought, but were not part of the historical consist,
I was able to scan every letter but one. I had to build an “H”
in Photoshop by using parts of other letters. The rest of the
car names I was able to piece together, letter by letter, using
scanned letters.
My first attempt was to paint over the numbers and names
with a yellow that matched the cars. That didn’t work, so I next
tried to scrape off the new paint and the lettering. While this
worked, this left damage to the yellow paint underneath and
surrounding colors. I initially decaled them anyway and left it at
that in 2010. I was not happy with the results.
When I was testing some other cars on the Suncoast Model
Railroad Club, I mentioned my dilemma to Carl Marchand. He
suggested that I should have “erased” the names and numbers
from the cars. After the engine came back, I tried painting over
6:. The damaged paint. This
is an example of one of the
three cars that I tried to
rename and renumber.
6
MRH-Jul 2013
