In my last post I mentioned a discussion I had with my Mastermind group. Well, it wasn’t the only one we had, because somehow or other we started talking about racks for spray paint.

The rack I use is a bit of a Frankenstein.

Frankenstein’s Monster to be more precise. But anyway, here it is:

It started out life as a pair of racks designed to be hung on doorways, which look like this:

I found it over on Amazon (this is an affiliate link, although at the time of posting it is out of stock). The thing I liked about this was that it had the individual wooden slats to hold the cans in place, as well as the small notch cutout at the bottom to hold the cans in place. Lacking any real door space in the layout room, I decided to build a rolling cart rack instead.

I built them individually, put them back-to-back, and then added a platform and casters so I could roll it around the room.

My friend Greg built the nice handle for the top to complete the package. With the handle it’s easy to grab the rack and roll it to wherever I might need it in the layout room. The finished rack will hold up to 40 spray cans, enough for me to have a wide array of colors on hand as needed.

Like last time, I’m going to plug the group. If your modeling is stalled and you need help setting and sticking to your modeling goals, that’s what Mastermind is all about. If you’re interested, you can sign up by going to my Patreon and choosing the SD60M tier. Or reach out for more info.

It really is a spectacle that every modeler should see at least once.

Last night, after the main part of my monthly Mastermind meeting wrapped up, a bunch of the members and I got to talking about the show and how you have to have a strategy for some of the vendors to make sure you don’t miss out on some things.

One of those is The Load Man who makes some really, really nice open car loads. I promised the Masterminds I would share photos of some of the loads I’ve picked up in the past, and I decided to share them here, as well. because, well, why not share the wealth? (Plus I’ve been a total slacker about posting here for a long time.)

So here we go.

Bethlehem Steel is not the only mill that gets love, so if that’s not your bag, you’re not completely out of luck.

Maybe it was a mistake to share this before the show, but honestly if he’s sold out before I get there, it’s money I won’t be really Really REALLY tempted to spend.

Incidentally, if your modeling is stalled and you need help setting and sticking to your modeling goals, that’s what Mastermind is all about. If you’re interested, you can sign up by going to my Patreon and choosing the SD60M tier. Or reach out for more info.

*FWIW, West Springfield is the closest thing to a home town as I have.

I also talked about paint colors, specifically (in the video) about how the vermilion (“orange” to some) color on the engines tend to be a problem spot, if any.

In one of the comments, Jeff Hanke asked, not about the vermilion but the yellow, wondering how the latest Athearn models compare to earlier GP40-2 offerings by Atlas. (In older runs, the difference in yellow shades was quite noticeable.)

These two images show the new Athearn GP40-2 (left) and a roughly 10 year old Atlas GP40-2 (right) engine side by side.

These next two images show the new Athearn GP40-2 (left) and a roughly 15 year old Atlas GP38 (right) engine side by side.

To my eye, at least in my lighting, they are pretty close. The GP40-2 are closer than the GP38. In both cases, the Athearn is slightly darker in both the yellow and vermilion, but not so different as to be glaring. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to run these together, and once weathered, I think the difference would be negligible.

While I think both Athearn and Atlas are pretty close. Not so for some earlier Walthers, where the vermilion was just… RED.

Recent Walthers runs have been better, but I was so put off by these older runs that I haven’t bought a Walthers loco since.

Your mileage may vary.

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Now, there are a lot of pros to having a layout with one set railroad (or three… c’mon! I’m only human!) along with a set location and time. It becomes quite easy to know what you need to buy and what you don’t. It takes a lot of the temptation out of looking at new product announcements.

Sure, you can fudge some of your industries, and there’s always that “universal industry” concept that comes with interchange (though there are limits there, too, as I’ve found out with my Canton RR interchange), but by and large, once you’ve got those parameters set, it’s pretty easy. Especially when your layout is a specific, small subdivision.

“So what’s the problem?” you ask?

I love SD40-2s.

They are in my top 5 favorite locomotives of all time. So, while there are huge benefits to having built-in limitations on my buying needs because my path is set, the con is that I also lose some flexibility because my path is set. And when I see an announcement like the one from Athearn for some piece of equipment that I really love, I cringe a little.

Sure, I could buy a couple, but they simply don’t fit in my operating scheme. It’s a 1.5 mile long subdivision. There’s just no need for them. They don’t make sense.

As it is I have some fantasy scheme C40-8s. I don’t need anything else that doesn’t fit the bill. I guess I’ll just have to suck it up.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t drool a little…

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In my last post, when talking about upcoming work, I said: “The first step is to paint the track. ” Well, I lied. Or forgot. Or something.

After finishing that post (about 3.26 seconds after pressing “Publish”) the light bulb went on that I needed to do some additional work at the Cambridge Iron & Metal spur before painting.

Here’s the way the spur looked before modifications.

What you see here is Code 100 track transitioning to Code 83 track. Replete with many, perfectly aligned ties. But, on the layout, this is industrial and will be buried in the dirt, so it wouldn’t be the most well-maintained piece of track on the system. And it certainly wouldn’t have the volume of ties that mainline track would. To get that effect, I decided to remove a bunch of ties. I also decided to shorten the length of the track. As shown, it would hold four gondolas and a locomotive, way more than I needed. So I cut it down to hold a locomotive and two gondolas, which will increase scenic possibilities in this little semicircle.

Step 0: Music. I went with this. I highly recommend it, but I won’t hold it against you if you choose something different.

Step 1: Cut off and remove the excess track. I do this using a Dremel with a cut-off disc (and wearing safety glasses).

Step 2: Carefully pull up the track. I say “carefully” because, of course, it was already wired.

Step 3: Cut the ties and start to pull the unneeded ones off. I use a Craftsman Handi-Cut tool for this. I bought this tool a long time ago and somewhere along the line discovered it was perfect for this task (and not much else, to be honest).

Step 4: Once the appropriate number of ties are removed, carefully push the track back down flat and check alignment.

In this case, the alignment where the Code 100 track meets the Code 83 was… well… bad. But again, this is industrial track that wouldn’t have the best maintenance. I fiddled with it to try to improve it, with only moderate success. But as long as it didn’t cause derailments, I’d be okay with it.

Step 5: Test.

Good enough, in my opinion.

Step 6: Tack down the track to ensure final alignment. I added a lot of new holes for track nails in the ties that remained to make sure things would stay put.

Done! Final result:

Okay. Now I can paint track…

Teaser: here’s the spot after painting a base coat.

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It may not look like much and, at the moment, it’s not. But there will be a reasonable amount going on here when I’m done. I talked a little bit about this area a while back in this post.

This area will represent S. Newkirk St., Consolidated Coal, and Cambridge Iron & Metal. That’s a lot of ground to cover, literally and figuratively.

Compression dictates that I take some liberties with the prototype here to fit things in. And to that end, I’m playing with forced perspective for the first time. The National Gypsum plant will be visible behind the Consolidated Coal loop. In Canton, it’s set pretty far from the viewer, but I need to fill an area of only a few inches between the track and the wall. So, we’ll see how that goes.

The first step is to paint the track. And truth be told, I’ve been procrastinating on that. There’s a lot of masking to be done and a lot of newspaper to be hung, which can be pretty tedious.

After that, things will start to come together. I’ve already been doing some mock-ups and such, which I’ll cover in some upcoming posts.

Stay tuned!

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