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.