Midland Terminal video

Here! No doubt about it - looks like it's all post-WWII, with the majority of the footage of the ex-Army 2-6-0s. But plenty of footage of the ex-CM steamers, in the District and on Ute Creek Pass - the closest you'll ever get to seeing authentic color footage of the Colorado Midland Railway.

(Almost) Completed engine

So here it is: not a bad little engine, really. I did decide to leave the handrails in their raw brass form (and substituted brass wire to get the full effect), thinking that might be a good look for a well-kept turn-of-the-century express engine, but I'm not wholly satisfied by the look: it's a little toylike, I think. But the trailing truck worked out well. It required no modification; in fact, the engine ran much better with it than it did with the original truck, probably because that bar I thought I might have to replicate on the replacement truck shifted too much of the engine's weight onto the lead driver. I have to admit that I never counted on the simple possibility that the design might be bad, but it worked out well, and the engine is no longer slippery.

As initially built, it ran poorly - it shook, and the gears ground, so I disassembled the engine and removed the motor, gearbox and motor mount. Then I slipped a small piece of notebook paper, folded over, between the motor and the mount, and this cut the vibration and noise way down. Now it runs well, and creeps right along; at some point I have to paint and weather the motor mount, but I'll get to it in good time; for now, it's just nice to have it running.

A few other improvements: I'm going to replace the lead wheels with spoked wheels, which always add a certain period flair. The arch-bar trucks on the tender are going to go, too - I'm waiting on some PSC 4 wheel NYC-style fabricated Commonwealth trucks that look appropriate for passenger service, and I'm considering taking a mulligan on the tender paint job: I'm not totally happy with the decaled lining-out, although I do like the look. I have a spare MDC tender shell, and I periodically consider redoing it - although that might put me on the wrong side of the borderline between nitpicky and neurotic.

I also made some fairly small modifications to the boiler that greatly improve the look of the engine. First and foremost was the bell; Roundhouse engines generally come with an integrally-cast bell that has neither bracket nor hanger, and looks like a small pen cap sitting on the boiler. A good bolt-cutter will take it right off, and you can file the sprue flush. Once that was done, I bored out a hole where the sprue had been, and a very simple Cal-Scale bell and hanger assembly made a big difference. I also bored an .020" hole in the right side of the cast whistle, and fabricated an actuating arm out of a small piece of brass wire. Before I installed the cab, I bored .010" holes on either side of the backhead space, and ran two pieces of .010" brass wireout of them. Then I installed the cab, clipped the wire to length, and glued it to the bell assembly and the whistle actuating arm, taking care to put a very slight curve in both (a very tiny touch of ACC secures it nicely to the dome, retaining the curve). Then I used an 000 brush to paint the wire a slightly different shade of black, so that it stood out just a bit against the boiler. This was not hard to do, but it added some nice visual interest to the model. I bored a pair of holes in the smokebox ( the rivet pattern and the handrail lines allow you to space them correctly), installed some black-painted classification lights, and replaced the stock pilot truck wheels with some PSC 33" spoked wheels - which give a much more elegant front end, reminiscent of the early Western Pacific ten-wheelers.

Modeling the modern....

....is not generally something I care much about. I'm moved mostly by the things I see in museums, not Silverliners. And yet.....when I saw this website, I have to admit I felt a bit of a twinge. I've climbed on a Silverliner at 30th Street more times than I can count - and their dinginess always feels a few steps removed from the weary wooden coaches I love, or even the South Shore car I rode as a young boy, back in 1982, when they were just weeks way from the deadline.

And yet....seeing these, it's hard not to think of what you could do with them, and how they would look on a model of the Northeast Corridor.

If you like interlockings....

....I have the site for you.

Age of the Decapods: A Review

The Colorado Railroad Museum has released its much-awaited (by me, at least) Rail Annual, "Age of the Decapods." This book, which is Bob LeMassena's latest, is a very good effort, nicely produced and worth the money. The title is a touch misleading, but not in an annoying way, for it's the rare misnomer that promises more than it delivers. "Decapod" to most people means "2-10-0," but Mr. LeMassena extends it to cover every five-coupled steam locomotive class used in America - including a pair of narrow-gauge Decapods built for Mexican service, the Virginian's massive 2-10-10-2s, and a unique 1903 Baldwin 2-10-2 with slide valves and Stephenson valve gear.

In arrangement and content it is a perfect companion to his Articulated Steam Lcocomotives of North America, and it should be understood as a sort of primer on the topic - not the last word. Just as in the earlier effort, he catalogues each class of engine on the basis of design and road of ownership, recataloguing them when they switch owners or the road changes identity - a feature that will require the casual browser to resort to other publications, perhaps, for the details to fill in the blanks, but one that ensures room is conserved for the photos that tell their own story of transition and change.

It would be easy to criticize it for the things it omits, but it's important to understand that a work of this kind takes an extraordinary amount of research, and that it's meant to be a catalogue, something that can cue the interested reader or modeler to look for more detailed information in other sources. He made a deliberate decision to omit the dimensional data that he included in the earlier work in favor of a simple statement of weight on drivers and tractive effort, which I rather regretted, but apart from that, my biggest complaint was the cursory treatment of the Baldwin standard light and heavy Decapods of the 1920s. As a class and an idea, these got a shorter treatment than they received in Kalmbach's Guide to North American Steam Locomotives, while the Pennsylvania's I-1s got a lengthy essay. In LeMassena's defense, it's only fair to point out that something like 598 of the 700-odd decapods built in America were I-1s, but their existence and traits have been thoroughly documented elsewhere; a guide like this could profitably have dwelt a bit on the reasons why Baldwin decided to try to develop the market with the light and heavy designs in the Twenties, and it could also have noted the class distinction between light and heavy Baldwin decapods in the individual entries. The dimensional data that was provided certainly comes in handy, for a glance at the weight on the drivers will suffice to reveal the distinction without further reference, but I would have liked to see a bit more - for that brief criticism aside, more of anything Mr. LeMassena does is always welcome on my bookshelf.

Modelers and buffs alike will find this an interesting book, and an excellent reference to the topic.

Progress!

And here it is - with the toughest part done (the tender is still a substitute, but that will change as soon as I get the body shell weathered and assembled). The real challenge with these models is the chassis, valve gear, and motor; get those working (and more importantly, working once they've been painted), and you're in business.

There are always some challenges, and this kit was no exception. The valve gear was generally easy to get together, but some of the punchings were too small to accomodate the rivets, so I had to bore them out. Once it was all together, it was just a process of assembly, testing, disassembly, fixing, reassembly, retesting......and eventually it all went together. The crossheads gave some trouble, but a lot of filing (of both the crosshead and the rails) and a little lubrication finally put things right.

Once the mechanism was perfect, I tested it with the boiler and cab, which will provide most of the weight. While wheel arrangements are really not a good indicator of anything, this engine did have some prototypical qualities: like a real Atlantic, it had "too much git, and not enough dig." It did have power - but it's so light on the drivers that the engine slips very easily, and I don't expect it to start a heavy train. I may try to remedy this by pouring some low-melt alloy metal into the boiler to add weight. As you can see in the picture, it still has the stock trailing truck. This has a surprising importance - it's not just decoration. The rigid wheelbase is very short, and there's a definite tendency to tip backwards if the trailing truck isn't installed. The stock truck comes with a flat plate atop the truck structure, which serves as a slide bearing for the rear of the frame. It looks like I'm going to have to do something with the Hodge truck to ensure it can bear the frame, perhaps install a small u-shaped brass plate, which may take some doing if it's going to be kept inconspicuous.

All the paint on this engine is Scalecoat; I put on a base of loco black, weathered it with Bragdon's powder, and then added a flat varnish layer. The rods were done in graphite, and the results are subdued, and with a light dusting of reddish and yellow powder give the appearance of road grime. I masked off the driving wheel tires, and I'm pretty happy with the results; the look is of a well-maintained engine that's been logging a lot of road time.

A Tale of Two Depots

The whole issue of plausibility, and its tenuous relationship with reality, informs a lot of modeling. The problem of getting the 4-4-2 that I'm building "right" spurred me to go back and take a look or two at a couple of other interesting models that have grappled with the same problem - one a model of an actual station, and the other, a model of a model. Since my next planned project after the 4-4-2 is, likewise, a model of a model, I've been giving this point some thought.

Sometimes the prototype is perfect - just what you need. Other times, the prototype comes close to what you want it to be - but you want to modify it just a bit. One good case in point is the Colorado Midland Railway' station in Granite, Colorado (station is unfortunately just out of view to the left of this photo). This was built in 1887, and at the time, Granite was the seat of Lake County. The station was a two story split-level affair, and when I first saw photos of it I never associated it with this.

The model you see in the picture is a 1970s-era craftsman kit, known as "Granite Station," manufactured by a small and apparently defunct company called Timberline Models. I've been partial to this model ever since I was a kid. My dad picked up a copy of the old "Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette" for me when I was ten, and it contained a piece on sprucing up one of these models; the image stuck in my mind (as the work of a lot of 1970s-era modelers like John Olson and Mal Furlow did), and when I came across it decades later, I started searching online in hopes of finding it, and discovered the kit, the maker, and the prototype.

I was surprised to find, however, that the real Granite depot was a very austere structure by comparison - those marvellous windowframes, for example, were a product of someone's imagination. The real Midland was too cash-strapped for fancy ornamental windowframes, and settled for simple double-hunge windows - and it didn't bother with a canopy, supported by fancy posts and the elaborate bracketing for the eaves. When I realized the Timberline model was unaffordable and went back to look at Dan Abbott's Daylight Through The Divide in hopes of finding plans, I was surprised at how simple the prototype really was. It was like seeing someone famous without the makeup on.

Similarly, I've always been fond of the logging diorama John Olson built and photographed for Model Railroader in May, 1976 - his "Mule Shoes Meadow" layout. I've always been partial to the high mountain parks and valleys, and I thought the Mule Shoes layout is a very fine mix of the railroad and the deep woods. It's a little modern for my taste, but backdate it a few years and you can plausibly imagine something of the kind as a junction for a branchline on a slightly larger railroad at the turn of the century. The original photo essay captured several shots of the depot, from various angles. It was a less adorned building than the Timberline structure, and so far as I know it was scratchbuilt, but I always liked the look of it - a big,rambling frame building, one third depot, one third office, one third cooking and living space. Apparently I'm not the only one, because Wiseman Model Services seems to have used it as a rough prototype for their Horseshoe Meadow Depot, which is currently available (and worth the price, I might add).

I bought one on the strength of the initial resemblance, and did a closer comparison once I had it at home. I was surprised at some of the variations the kit builders introduced - the pitch of the roof, for example, is noticeably steeper on the mass production model. I had not initially noticed this, but something about it strikes me as noticeably unnecessary - the steep pitch makes the building a bit higher, but doesn't provide much in the way of additional covered space. I understand that buildings in snowy areas need a steep camber to shed the snow, but the camber is so steep that it would require a lot of additional roof space, but would not generate much in the way of usable additional floor space - if you look at the second floor, for example, you can imagine that the interior's basically a cathedral ceiling. They also added a shingled roof on the bay window, which protrudes out just a bit further on the Wiseman model than it did on Olson's original, and of course, the cast chimneys are more ornate.

It's not a bad-looking result, but it does sort of raise an important question: is it worthwhile doing something just because "it looks good?" And does it look good because it's well-engineered, or does it look good because it conveys an impression you wish for it to convey? I'm open to either answer, actually. The fact of the matter is that I like both manufactured models. I also like the Granite depot as it was built, and I like Olson's depot enough to have retained an enduring impression - for I first saw it in the library at Oak View Elementary School at the age of six, when I paged through a bound volume of MR during library time, and I remembered enough to recognize the photo essay when I saw it again decades later. Something made each of these structures memorable, and beautiful. Plausibility is a part of that beauty, because it contributes to the suspension of disbelief, without which there can be no effective modeling. There's a tension between brute reality and beauty, sometimes, and the trick lies in the resolution. I've been working at this on my 4-4-2, and hope to have a photo up in a couple of days; we'll see then how well I've resolved that tension!

Next project

So in true model railroad fashion, it's off one project, and on to the next before the first one's wholly finished. My next project is the Model Die Casting ATSF 4-4-2 you see here. I just bought it a few months back, but I suspect it's fairly elderly, because the boiler is wholly die-cast Zamac, rather than the plastic-coated Zamac MDC went to on some of its models in the last years of kit production. I don't know whether they ever retooled the Atlantics; I suspect this kit dates from the early '90s, since it does have a can motor. I'm frankly glad it doesn't have the boiler detail in plastic; I find metal a bit more forgiving. Plastic needs a lot of care and non-abrasive treatment, so you can't buff your errors out, at least not so easily, and I tend to be heavy-handed.

I'm also going to customize it a bit. As it is now, four things mark this engine - almost irrevocably - as Santa Fe property: the trailing truck, the train indicator boards, the cab windows, and the front end. I'm going to leave the front end as it is, because I like the number plate at the center of the smokebox, but the trailing truck has to go. The Santa Fe used an early built-up truck, and it has a clunky, dreadnought-era look to it. I got a Precision Scale Hodge trailing truck that's essentially the same as the trailing trucks used on the USRA engines, and since I have a couple of those already, the different truck will, I hope, impart a slight look of mechanical commonality. My Bowser 2-10-2, for example, has a similar front end and an identical trailing truck. The cab is another matter; I have given some thought to fabricating one out of brass or just picking up a PSC cab kit, but I haven't quite made up my mind yet. It's not ugly, and it certainly has an era-appropriate look, but the paired arched windows are distinctively Santa Fe. The same can be said for the indicator boards, but those are easily disposed of. It's amazing how different an engine looks when a prominent feature like a train indicator board is removed - the additional advantage, in this case, being that there's no piping to rereoute or alter, as there would be with most appliances. Pictures will be posted as construction progresses, and we'll see how my notions work out in practice.


One of the problems with freelancing is that at some point, you start to notice the divergent lineages of the different pieces of equipment, and more annoyingly, the provenance of the models. With a model like this one, it takes a frustratingly large amount of work to avoid that problem, particularly since the piping and a lot of the detail is cast into the boiler. Big changes, like switching the trailing truck, at least distract the eye away from the stuff that's eradicable only with excessive amounts of work, and I think when bashing an engine like this success depends on correctly identifying those big things and changing them to fit your own design.

28' boxcars

So this is the project I’ve just completed – a set of five BTS Pennsylvania Railroad XA-class 28’ boxcars. Twenty-eight foot cars were very common in the period between the end of the Civil War and the First World War, and they were state-of-the-art in the 1870s, when the XAs were built: they have a definite “shorty” look, even compared to the 34’ cars that replaced them. Like a lot of modelers, my freight car fleet began with the injection-molded MDC 34’ and 40’ boxcar kits that have been on the market since time immemorial, and I never thought much about anything else until I started doing some research on the 1870-1910 era; I had sort of mentally walled off small boxcars as Civil War/Central Pacific-era equipment. My reading on the Colorado Midland confirmed this prejudice: the Midland was built in the late 1880s, and its boxcar fleet was all 34-40’ cars, and you don’t see much small foreign road equipment in the pictures, probably because the Midland restricted the number of non air-braked cars that could be included in trains. I was therefore very surprised when I found a pair of tables that catalogued the numbers of box cars on the Philadelphia and Reading at the turn of the century and shortly thereafter, and found that a substantial number of 20-22 ton cars (which were probably about 28’ long) were still in revenue service. But this seems to have been fairly typical, particularly for roads that had been around for more than twenty years before the turn of the century.

This turned out to be great; I had always liked the look and the proportions of the shorter cars, particularly the original Central Pacific equipment (I still have one of Rio Grande Models’ CP ventilated boxcars on a shelf awaiting my attention), and they have certain aesthetic and operational advantages. They’re shorter – here’s a picture showing how five 28’ cars fit in the space occupied by four 34’ cars – they tend to emphasize the age of the layout, and they don’t dominate the surrounding scenery and buildings. I was looking for cars that could, once built, become a sort of rolling scenic background. Not everything can stick out on a model railroad, and not everything should. I was looking for decently unobtrusive equipment that would be era-appropriate without distracting the viewer away from the structures, locomotives, or specialized equipment that deserves a prominent place. I also wanted a group of cars that looked the same, to provide the “fleet” feeling you get on a real railroad.

All of these considerations made the BTS cars a natural choice. They were also economical: they are sold individually for $22.95, and you can get a five-pack for $99.95, which is a $14 savings - almost enough to order a sixth car. They don’t come with trucks, but I wanted a 4’6” wheelbase truck with a high diamond arch bar, and Bitter Creek had just the thing. You can put bigger trucks under them, of course, but at some point you run into a proportionality problem, because they look too big for the car – some of the early BTS cars on their website, for example, were built with the generic-looking MDC arch bar trucks from those 34’ boxcars, and they look just a bit too big. I have used Rio Grande Models CP arch bars (as seen on the ventilated boxcar) in the past, but I decided to try the Bitter Creek trucks, and I like them. They’re the perfect length, and they come assembled, so you just have to paint them.

The BTS kits are laser-cut, and they build up very well. When you do five of them at once, you can assemble them all together, and this saves a considerable amount of time. At some point I’m going to letter them, but it may be months before I do that. I recently saw a nice picture of some NP boxcars in Bob Lorenz’s book on NP steam, and the consist included several cars that were obviously of the same class, decorated in the same way. In a nice “period” touch, the “Northern Pacific” was painted as a sort of arc on one side of the car, and I really liked the introduction of the curve into a surface that’s otherwise wholly linear – boxcar lines, after all, are pretty much linear or angular.

A ten-drivered Harmonic Convergence!

Dan's Train Depot is offering a whole slew of models (including the pilot models) of an all time favorite of mine, the D&RGW F-81 class 2-10-2 in two configurations: as they looked in the 1920s, and the 1940s (more photos here). Both were imported by Pacific Fast Mail in 1978, and all of these models appear to have come from the PFM collection, which Dan's seems to be liquidating. At 32 years of age they stand an excellent chance of outlasting the prototypes, which were turned out from Alco's Brooks Works at Dunkirk, NY in 1917 and went into the furnaces at Pueblo, CO in the early 1950s. When L.F. Loree surveyed the Grande in September, 1917 they were working between Minturn and Salida as helpers, but they soon went to Utah to lug coal drags over Soldier Summit. When they were built, they were the biggest nonarticulated engines in the world - and the Grande crews promptly nicknamed them "submarines." Someone composed a quatrain:

they built me for a submarine
but they had no guns
so they sent me to the Rio Grande
to haul ten thousand tons.

They did, too- they were rated for 81,200 pounds of tractive effort, which was big even for a 2-10-2.

There are some pictures of them as delivered in Jackson Thode's book of George L. Beam's corporate photography. There have been two runs of brass imports- the 1978 PFM Crowns, and a 2004 Precision Scale run. Neither captures them precisely as built, but for my money, the PFM early version probably comes the closest. Aesthetically speaking, the earlier version is more appealing - there are no awnings to conceal the curve of the arched cab window, and the engines themselves are cleaner - there are fewer appliances, such as the overfire air jets, which no doubt improved combustion (Brooks engines were notoriously poor steamers) at the expense of appearance. The earlier versions also include a tiny little Vanderbilt tender that's nothing but curves and catwalks, with a little doghouse perched slightly off the centerline just behind the coal bunker. These were always a reminder of just how far the infrastructure of the "Dirty, Ragged and Greasy" lagged behind its locomotive purchases, but they were a requirement - longer tenders would not have fit on most of the turntables the Grande owned in 1917. As an aesthetic thing, I think small tenders always improve the appearance of a steam engine - they make the engine appear proportionately larger, and it's nice when they have as much visual interest as these do.

Coincidentally, the Colorado Railroad Museum chose the same moment to announce its latest Rail Annual - Bob LeMassena's book on Decapod locomotives. It sounds as if they've stretched the definition of "decapod" to "five coupled engine," which is fine - save for the old PFM book on the Texas types, there aren't too many studies out there, and lots of interesting classes are almost unchronicled - the Northern Pacific's interesting pair, the Lehigh Valley engine that gave the type its name, and the Baldwin heavy, to name only a few - so I look forward to the treatment. And at $60, it's a lot cheaper than those pilot models!

Good news

Bowser assures me that most of the Cal-Scale parts will remain in production, and the Bowser parts will remain available.....for a while......which is very good news!

Cagney locomotives

So I opened Shorpy the other day and found....this! And I thought, wait, I've seen one of those before - and sure enough, I had!

There are still a few of these knocking around, and they're even more delightful now than they were when first built - after all, steam was pretty ordinary in 1905.

Report from the Great Scale Model Train Show

This weekend, I attended my favorite quarterly event: the Great Scale Model Train Show in Timonium, Maryland. I discovered it a few years back, in the sense that Columbus discovered America: it was a giant entity full of people who knew it well, and I just sort of happened to bump into it. I don't think it's the biggest show going, but it's probably my favorite, and it has a lot going for it. The target audience has traditionally been the brass-buying, scale-model-building hardcore model railroader, but it's not so narowly targeted that there's no room for others, particularly children. The show is the most kid-friendly I've seen, and they do some wonderful grace-and-favor activities for kids that must cost them some coin, but that return nothing but good will - for example, they put out a gigantic rug and a big pile of Thomas trains, and let the kids play under the supervision of their parents; they also had a little table where enthusiasts took a lot of time helping little children build paper-plate dioramas with some of the less expensive components of the hobby, like trees and foliage. These activities delighted my children, and I suspect that they're the product of the same mind that conceived the show in the first place.

That mind belongs to Howard Zane, the successful entrepreneur who retired to spend his time building his model railroad and and running the show he conceived. Howard's one of those one-in-a-million minds that you find in the hobby once every couple of decades. He was trained as a graphic designer and worked for Raymond Loewy's firm; he went into the Army and became an aviator. After building a successful aviation business (I believe he repossessed airplanes), he retired. The show and his Piermont Division are his retirement activities. What background could better prepare a man for a role as a model railroading kingpin? He understands how businesses are run, how they grow, and how they fail; he has the artistic ability to conceive, design, and build beautiful things, and I was struck by the fascination his table of model structures exerted on my children. The power to create delight is or ought to be the essence of artistic ability, and it's nice to see it combined with a real business sense, because in the cottage-industry world of model railroading, you need real acumen to keep a small business afloat.

I suspect that acumen is going to make a big difference in the coming year, because I was struck by the thinness of the crowds. It was not as crowded as it usually is, and my own very imperfect survey of the brass tables suggested that things were not moving much, either. It's sort of in the nature of things that shows are markets, with each individual seller making pricing decisions, and word of mouth and the Internet providing such information sharing as there is; voluntary efforts like pricing guides certainly help, but pricing information is naturally dynamic, and hard to capture.

I think I’m in good company if I say that I really come to train shows for two reasons: one is to find discounts (hopefully deep discounts) on items I already want. Another is to find those items that I’m not able to get elsewhere – particularly brass. I find as I get more and more deeply involved in the “building" (kit and scratch) side of the hobby that I have a greater need for both discounts and assistance in getting increasingly hard-to-find items at lower prices. Both the brass market and the steam detail parts market are increasingly subject to the economics of scarcity, complicated by the economic situation, and it’s anyone’s guess what this will mean.

There are some differences between the two markets, however. While the supply of brass models does continue to increase slightly, the overall market size should be fairly stable. Short of a trip to the basement floor or a poorly executed house move, the supply of 1950-1990 era brass models isn’t going to decline much. It will fluctuate slightly as the models come in our out of the market, based largely on factors that are, strictly speaking, external to the market – the number of estate sales, for example. Detail parts, on the other hand, will get used up fairly quickly. And they are already becoming scarce. It’s not clear what parts Bowser will continue to make, but some of the Cal-Scale parts are already off the market, and prices are rising. I will give you an example, from this week’s GSMTS. I found a very nice Cal-Scale Hodge trailing truck, and inquired about the price. On being told it was twenty dollars (and knowing that Precision Scale charges $17 for an unassembled brass kit), I asked the dealer why it wasn’t sixteen dollars, the price scribbled on the label. He replied, not entirely politely, that I now knew what he paid for it. I put it back; I’m not yet so desperate that it looked like an appealing price, and to be honest, I’m not altogether sure that this isn’t simply overpriced. But one of my favorite detail part makers, Greenway, is pricing their Hodge trucks at $45, which may be a sign of things to come.
Is this a permanent situation? I don’t know. The steam kit situation is pretty bad right now, the worst, in fact, that it has ever been. When Bowser exited the steam kit business last year, the domestic steam kitbuilding industry essentially died, and the trade now survives on Ebay and at shows. The detail parts business was collateral damage. There will continue to be a demand for detail parts, of course, because people will still want to redetail ready-to-run steam power, and the supply of kits and kitbashable locomotives will probably not be exhausted for a decade or so – although I would guess that the prices will continue to escalate on Ebay. But even at this lower level, at some point the supply will dwindle. If the prices become high enough, Bowser might conceivably decide that the economics are such that they warrant market re-entry, but I frankly doubt it – their inventory was largely Pennsy and USRA power, and those two classes of engine were among the first the RTR market provided.

Given the stability in the supply, the situation in the brass market is a little different. That supply will diminish somewhat in growing years, but I would suspect that the course of nature will mean a lot of stuff that’s currently off-market will return as big collections are liquidated. I think some of this is already happening; you can look at the frequency with which the results of estate liquidations now appear on the sites of the bigger brass dealers like Dan’s Train Depot. But part of me suspects that the question of supply will take a back seat to the bigger issue of the overall condition of the economy. It has long been a truism that “brass will always increase in value,” but I wonder whether that’s true. I don’t know whether anyone who will discuss it has researched the matter, but I would bet that the buyers’ market has contracted – which confronts sellers who have a substantial brass inventory with a real problem. They’re a low-margin operation to begin with; cut your price too much, and you trim that margin to nothing; cut it too little, and your inventory sits, maybe losing value, maybe gaining it. That’s not a retailer’s dream.

I admit to being a bit of a jackal on the fence on this. I didn’t buy any brass this weekend; I can’t help but feel the prices are still just a bit too high. Perhaps I’m right, or wrong – I had a few desultory exchanges with vendors who responded to my request by allowing they might be able to go as low as $Y or $Z – but only a few of those seemed attractive, and none was attractive enough to move me. I hope that's not a feeling that's widely shared - because a lot of the businesses that sustain the hobby are low-margin operations, and lean years can hit them hard - and in a hobby that's heavily dependent on cottage industries, we will regret them if they go.

Why a LaBelle model?

So this is the latest project I've managed to finish - a wooden LaBelle model of a circa-1902 Pullman observation car, painted and lettered as the Denver Northwestern and Pacific's "Marcia." Not a perfect model, alas: time constraints kept me from chopping it down from the actual length of 78 scale feet to the more prototypical 68 feet, and I couldn't add some of the "extras" that would have improved it. It's a presentation model for a friend who's retiring, and the overriding need was to get it finished on time. It took about a month of evenings, but it was time well spent.

Why bother with a wooden kit in this age of breathtaking resin-molded cars? It's a reasonable question. LaBelle kits have been around for a long time, and they look like it. They can be improved, sure, but it's hard to get the breathtaking perfection that's now available in a Westerfield kit, or even the better laser-cut wooden kits. They don't come with trucks or couplers, and when you open them, you're basically confronted with a sheet or two of plans, a handful of castings, and a big pile of sticks.

This is a real criticism in an age when you can easily get your hands on an easy-to-build and practically foolproof car kit, but it's also the secret to their appeal. A LaBelle kit is the perfect jumping-off point if you want to learn how to scratchbuild. There's no laser-cut built up core: you have to do it yourself, from the instructions they give you. That's a task, but it's not impossible, and once you're done, you have a very good idea of how you would go about building another car of the same type - or, if you felt like it, five of them, because a quick trip to the Northeastern website will get you much of what you need, and at an economical price. It's true that there are no tabs or prefabricated connections - but again, these are strengths, not weaknesses. These kits are forgiving of errors and do-overs in a way that a lot of plastic and resin kits are not, and the supply of stripwood is plainly calibrated for the needs of the ham-handed modeler.

They're great kits - and if, like me, you're interested in the wood coach era, you will quickly find that LaBelle basically owns the market. It's a niche, and very few kit manufacturers support or provide much passenger equipment for the 1890-1913 era - there are plenty of excellent open platform cars, and a few special-interest models of unique prototypes. But for the workaday wooden Pullman sleeping and parlor cars, coaches, baggage and RPO equipment, LaBelle is it - and I for one hope that they remain on the market for a long time to come.