A bit off topic but the Minnesota Transportation Museum is looking for help to repaint its SDP40 back to Great Northern Big Sky Blue this year. This is one of the only SDP40s left in existence, it was the last working passenger locomotive on a Class I railroad, and any help in preserving this unit would be appreciated!

Here's to hoping that Athearn releases an SDP40 someday to follow up on their excellent SDP45s as well.

With all the cool stuff that I have seen using the cricut machine, An idea hit me. Why not try to make detail parts. I have an old Athearn bluebox caboose that has those old end rails, so I thought about making the end rails closer to what is on the more modern cars. I started by scanning the end railing off a Walthers International caboose. Then using  paint.net I modified the image to fit the Athearn car. Then using Inkscape I saved the file in the svg format needed by Cricut.

Hi all,

While working on my new layout i will slowly be adding DCC to several DC locomotives on my fleet. I am having some thoughts and questions with respect to "how much sound" should i have in a particular consist.

The thoughts:

The consist will be having Genesis F units' for passenger service in ABBBA and AABBA setups.

The middle B unit on the first consist is going to be a dummy unit in the ABBBA consist.

I am thinking of having Sound decoders on the A units, motor only on the B units.

What HO gondolas are available that would be correct for a late 70s-early 80s time period. I believe alot of the Thrall gondolas available were based on mid 1990s models.