Managed to squeeze a little time in between the holidays, deer season, and everything else to finish up re-lettering, weathering and re-programming the three Bachmann steam engines and get them back on the railroad. The major impetus was getting my airbrushing setup out of our laundry room before family arrived for Christmas…
Like most projects, decaling all three locos took longer than I thought, mostly due to the fiddly tiny number decals on the front and rear headlights. That was followed by a seal coat of Future and a topcoat of Dullcote. The 2-6-0’s had ugly flat plastic disks for the front number plates, which bugged me, so these were replaced with Cal Scale brass castings.
The running gear, tender frames, and tender trucks of all three got a couple of misting passes of rattle can Vallejo Panzer Grey while the engines were running on DC power. (Thanks to my friend Rob Bennett for this technique. ( The Bennet Railroad ))
The motherboard and decoder in one of the Moguls did not like DC operation very much and somehow crapped out. Luckily, I had spares, but what a PITA, mostly due to Bachmann insisting on a nest of identical black wires inside the tender, instead of NMRA standard color-coding. (Remember, model railroading is FUN!!!)
Anyway, after that delay, I did light airbrush applications of dirt, oily black and dark rust here and there. The 2-6-0’s also got a wash of Van Dyke brown artist’s oil paint and turpenoid. Final layer is areas of PanPastel weathering colors on all three engines. I wanted the effect of hard-working but well-maintained machines. A little red accent around the cab window frames and a good wheel-cleaning and the engines were ready for decoder fine-tuning. I use TCS WOW Sound in all my engines, and while I’m not a huge fan of their Audio Assist voice decoder programming, it is more intuitive than wading through a zillion pages of nested CV’s in JMRI Decoder Pro.
I do use Decoder Pro to set the 4-digit address, a basic speed curve, and dim the headlight and backup light LED’s by about 50%. Then I switch to Audio Assist to set the chuff rate and program the dynamic exhaust. The other major setting is to turn down the global sound volume by 50-60%.
And that’s it. No more plain black plastic engines for the next op session! Now to get back to that passel of X29’s…
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