Projects

My wife's grandfather was an engineer for the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, and since I am known to be a train nut my mother in law asked me to make a little something for her to commemorate his service to that road.

My wife ventured the idea to put a boxcar in a display case, which I thought was a good one, and to that end I ordered off of Ebay the boxcar pictured below and a 4"x2" display case.

As you can see the boxcar is a 60 foot unit that scales out (60x12/160) to be about four and a half inches long, not counting the couplers. What that means is it is never going to fit in that 4 inch box.

So, back online I went to find a larger box, which I did, and at the same time I found this Bachmann SD50 locomotive for a pretty attractive price. So, I thought I would put both the locomotive and the boxcar in the new larger display case since there is going to be room for it.

Of course I did have to test-run the locomotive. It ran well with my SD7 but after one lap you could smell the motor...which is pretty typical for the old white-box Bachmann train set locomotives and kind of what I was expecting out of it anyway. So my plan is to pull the motor out of it and wire it up to a 9v battery and switch so that it can sit on the display track with the headlights on.


The new display case should be here in the next day or so and after that construction can commence. The new case has a detachable pedestal that runs the length of the box that I hope is hollow so that the battery can fit into it. If it is I will drill some holes into the locomotive frame and attach it with screws that can also be used to run the juice to it for the lights. The loco will sit on the pedestal and the boxcar will be on the base below and in front of the pedestal. The switch for the lights will be on the backside where it is not seen when the case is on a shelf.

My wife tells me I'm going way overboard for this simple project, but if it works it's going to look really cool.

UPDATE: It came out really well, and Grammy loved it.

She sent me a pic (that I didn't have saved to this computer) of it flanked by pictures of her father, one standing with his crew in front of his new PA1 and one of him in the cab of his K5A Pacific steamer. If I had seen them first I would have gotten a PA1 instead of the GP50 to put in the box, but it did give me the idea to start a new project building his Erie K5A.