Soeobo Pacific Model Railroad

I recently built a few of my favorite models, the heavyweight passenger car kits formerly made by Branchline.  They are exquisitely detailed and are very impressive once assembled.  It’s amazing that you can regularly find them at train shows for as little as $15 a kit.  In fact, you can make the case that these are among the best values in rolling stock available today. Atlas, after its purchase of Branchline, now produces these cars in ready-to-run form and sells them for upwards of $60 each.  This means that people willing to spend time assembling the kit versions can build practically an entire train for the price of one RTR car. The kit looks a bit intimidating out of the box, but it only requires a few basic skills. If you can build a Proto2000, Branchline, or Intermountain boxcar, you can build this kit.  The essential tools are a screwdriver, sharp hobby knife, liquid plastic cement (the kind that is thin as water), tweezers, and CA (super) glue. I ...

 The Burlington’s steam era waycars (cabooses) all had a similar look: wood construction, offset cupola, and 3 or 4 side windows riding on ancient wood beam passenger trucks.  The NE-10 class was notable for being the first class of steel waycars on the Q and looked much like steel versions of the wooden ones.  They were built by the CB&Q's Aurora shops in 1930 and were the newest waycars on the system until the mid 1950's.  By the time of my modeling era (late 1940's) several NE-10's had been equipped with radios and an underslung battery box to power the equipment.   I picked up a resin kit produced by Q Connection to model one of these radio equipped NE-10's.  Walthers has produced very good models of the earlier wood waycars, but the Q Connection kit is the only option outside of brass to model the NE-10.   I've built several resin kits, and the casting quality can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.  This kit was definitely...

Whenever I begin a new project I try to find someone who has done it before.  Someone who has built the same kit or fixed the same engine or figured out the right paint color for stainless steel.  It always helps to learn from others’ experiences.  But many times I fail to find a good reference.  Either my interests are so weird that no one else is building what I build, or they aren’t writing about their projects publicly. And so this blog is born.  If I am looking for this kind of information, I bet others are too.  My goal in creating this is to share interesting projects and modeling techniques in the hope that I can help out anyone who is working on something similar. My modeling interests heavily slant towards steam engines and first generation diesels, and just about all of my work is HO scale.  However, I believe that most modeling techniques are relevant across scales and eras.  One of my “hobbies” within this hobby is finding beat...