I am a sucker for shots of train looking up from below- it gives a sense of size and strength. This engine was sitting around and I got tired of the Seaboard colors- they were only in business for a few years.

Anyway I resurrected an old Maryland railroad- the Northern Central Railroad. It ran about 10 miles from the original site of the Joppa Iron Works in Eastern Baltimore County on the Gunpowder River (the Wikipedia for JIW was my fault….there is a lot that I contribute to Wikipedia on other subjects). Why not serve a defunct 1800’s iron mill with a defunct railroad?

Since the engine was gray already, the paint shop at Northern Central blocked out the old Seaboard logo with gray paint and stenciled the new logo on. Here is a side shot of the newer paint scheme:

The company photographer caught the engine in front of the electric arc furnaces at Joppa Iron Works. The logo takes its queue from the Baltimore County flag, and the scheme was inspired by Adam Peszel who designed the logo for Joppa Iron Works.

These engines can still be found around at swap meets, train shows, and online. They are neat little engines but have historically suffered from poor performance. Rather than trash it I decided to try a little work for getting better electrical pickup. There is a commercially available remotoring kit, but this small engine still only has 4 wheels on the rails and no upgrade to the motor will change this dynamic. Here is what I did.

First, I decided that the engine needed more contact with the rails, therefore I added track wipers to the bottom of the locomotive. Here is what it looks like with the body shell on:

These have to be added carefully since the frame of the loco is a two piece frame. One side is electrically opposite polarity from the other side- so you need to add the wipers carefully. The goal is to have the wiper wipe across the tread area of the wheel AND touch the track. You will need two wipers- one at the front of the loco and one between the wheels. This will permit you to pick up electrical contact from different places and gives good performance when passing over a turnout.

First, I cut thin brass strips with scissors and glued them to the frame of the locomotive using Walther’s GOO and a dab of Super Glue to bolster the bond. I use this double gluing whenever I need a very strong bond that may need to hold up being bumped or handled. This application for double gluing in this method is perfect.

This is what the front wiper looks like:

and this is what the middle wiper looks like:

These wipers need to contact both the wheel and the rail. Brass is easily bendable and can be manipulated in such a way that you can get a good contact and permit better operation.

Afterwards, you will need to lubricate the engine at these points:

Don’t over oil or you will turn an operational train into a static model! Use oil sparingly- and I use clipper oil for lubricating my trains.

I would be interested in hearing if you try this.

I decided to add a business to my city area recently. The kit was a City Classics Smallman Street Warehouse (Walthers 195-103) building that I had on the shelf for a few years and no application for. After reading a few articles on urban modeling that were written years ago in Model Railroader, I decided to pull the kit off of the shelf and have a go at it. One of the things that had always intrigued me were these warehouses that were built with an indentation for pulling rail cars into. Office or storage space were built over the rail bays to save room in a crowded city.

The kit itself takes up an 8 1/2 x 6 inch square area- which I was fine with. I did not want to have any additional space next to the building since that would have added another three inches or more for the siding. Why not bring the siding under the building? I did not have a suitable additional wall and was too lazy to buy an additional kit to cut up. Sometimes my laziness to do some of these things is the impetus for creativity.

Komatex is a PVC sheet product that I am very familiar with and strongly approve of as a modeling media. I measured the wall and additional bays, then cut the extra wall from Komatex. Afterwards I brush painted the building appropriately and viola! I now have an urban warehouse with the tracks underneath of the building. For the photo, I did use a background picture of Baltimore to add a little extra realism. Let me know what you think at joppaironworks (at) yahoo (dot) com.

A lot of my pictures that I have taken are low angle to give the sense that the layout is much larger than it is. On my basic model railroading Yahoo group at

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/basicmodelrailroading/

I have several more simple and overview pictures- and you can really get a sense of the small size of the layout and its level of completion (not very). This is about 6 month’s of work- but keep in mind that many of my structures have been built for a long time.

For “kicks and giggles” I am including a “warts and all” picture of my blast furnace. In a post somewhere below I have outlined some of my unorthodox materials- the main shape for the furnace was an inverted McDonald’s “Big Gulp” plastic cup. The stoves are tennis ball containers (yeah I know that a blast furnace is supposed to have no less than 3 stoves, but I didn’t have another matching container at the time…). Much of the structural top works are made of wood with some plastic and PVC piping. I get a free second blast furnace from a front silvered mirror in back of the layout. The cast house is built from Komatex- everything that you see is scratch built.

Could I redo it or buy the Walther’s furnace? You bet but I would never part with this one. It was built nearly 20 years ago from fuzzy pictures from library books- long before the Walther’s products were available. The company I was working for at the time was in bankruptcy, so things were tight financially. This furnace represents surviving through tough times and I will never replace it.

Someone gave me this as part of another kit years ago, and it had some associated large boxes with it. I have hear that steel mills use something similar to move slab steel around. I weathered the thing a little and painted a few details and wouldn’t mind using it on my railroad (where it is sitting now). What else should be around it? I do have to fix the “levitation” problem with one wheel…

Can anyone enlighten me on this? Who made the kit? What would a prototype one of these look like?

I get tons of spam on this site from overseas selling illegal pharmaceuticals for some reason, so I eliminated the ability to comment directly. Please email me at joppaironworks (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Thanks!