project with him by e-mail, and came to the conclusion that I
needed to acquire some parts to get where I wanted to be. My
intention was to have two shells for the one engine and switch
them back and forth to run two different trains. Todd con-
vinced me that a complete and proper City of Miami paint job
included the trucks on the engine, which would be the wrong
color for the engine if it was running the IC shell.
I needed another E6A
engine with any shell on
it. So, it was off to e-bay
again. Within about
a month or so, I had
acquired a Seaboard E6A.
The IC E6A #4003 was
now to go off and form
the nucleus of a Panama
Limited train.
While Todd was an expert
at painting certain color
schemes, he had no abil-
ity to do any DCC work
on the engine. I went to
a local train hobby shop
(Happy Hobo Trains,
Tampa, FL - RIP - 2011)
and asked about getting
someone to add DCC to
one or more engines for
me. I was put in contact
with Carl Marchand (Suncoast Model Railroad Club) who would
not only do that work for hire, but also does seminars at local
train shows teaching others to do it. It took several months pass-
ing the engines back and forth to get the 7 engines I have done
to date.
City of Miami - 7
16: The City of Miami on its
run to Miami.
16
I removed the front coupler and swapped in the closed door
scoop instead of the open door one. The nice thing is that the
Proto 2000 E6As shells came with both scoops. I created a decal
with two copies of the number 4000 in scarlet for the engine.
Todd is of the green lettering camp of the City of Miami and sells
a decal set for re-lettering the whole City of Miami train over into
that scheme.
So, in the fall of 2010, the newly DCC-equipped engine went off
for a paint job, decaling, and a few details. The details included
replacing all the roof lift rings, and adding a diaphragm to the rear
of the engine. While the engine was being painted I added one
more change (this is called scope creep). I asked Todd to replace
the existing LifeLike coupler with a Kadee #5, based upon the
experience I had with a fatigued LifeLike coupler on another E6A.
Todd also added some cab detailing on the interior of the engine.
The engine came back, but the delivery service was not as
careful as it should have been. Some green paint on the dia-
phragm had flaked off and the diaphragm itself had some edge
separation. Using the paint formula
supplied by Todd, I ran down the
colors and mixed up some touchup
paint and fixed the flaked off color.
The consist drawings are taken from
Illinois Central Streamliners 1936-
1946,
In Part 2 next month, I will go over
how I detailed the interior of the
cars.
MRH-Jul 2013
