Michigan City Swap Meet...Recap

Now that I am ready to start to add some buildings and terrain to my layout I decided to hit up a swap meet in Michigan City, IN today to see if I can get lucky. My goal was to mainly shop for N scale buildings first, then anything that I could find that was C&NW related.

Majority of the vedors that were on hand were selling HO scale and Lionel. I knew that getting into N scale I would have a harder time finding items, but I really do like the look of N scale over HO, I am probably in the minority but I feel N scale actually has more detail than HO scale.

I did an initial pass of all the vendor tables and did find two C&NW boxcars along with a N scale Freight Depot building all for $20, so I was pretty happy so far. I decided to go and double back now and search more throughly to see if I could find anything else. I cam across a C&NW gondola car, another N scale Soda Shoppe building, then buried under a lot of boxes, I found a KATO Chicago METRA Gallery Bi-Level Commuter Train 3-Car Set. I was able to get all these for $80. Just the KATO set alone retails for $100. Now the METRA cars do not fall into my pre-1987 era since they were manufactured between 2002 and 2005, but they fall into the category of me collecting METRA along with C&NW. The cars will go well with the Operation North Pole cars I already have.

I did find some good stuff, but I am still short on buildings. Hopefully I can attend a couple more of these swap meets in the next couple of months.

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2017 Lowell Smith Disney Christmas Car

Back at Trainfest in November I met Lowell Smith in the vendor area and loved the cars that he designs and sells. Back in 2010 he came out with the Disney Christmas Train line and each year reveals a new car at the Walt Disney Family Museum. These cars sell out very fast and I was lucky enough to be able to purchase the 2011 ‘Mickeys Good Deed’ and the 2013 ‘Bambi’ cars from him while there. The 2017 car was releasing on December 2nd and I knew I had to get my order in right away or I’ll miss out. Well I am glad that I ordered when I did. My car finally came in the other day, and when I went back to his website this morning, the car is already Sold-Out, along with every other year. It will be challenge to find/collect my missing years. Here is the 2017 Disney Christmas Car ‘Donald Duck’.

C&NW #928 EMD SD40 Locomotive

Well the last couple of days I have really been giving our USPS lady a workout, packages and packages arriving for my layout. I added another diesel freight locomotive to the roster with a KATO Chicago & North Western #928 SD40. This model I had purchased used through a Facebook Group and already equipped with DCC. The following is borrowed from Don’s Depot . 928 was built in September 1966, #32099, FN 7912-8, as CGW 408. It became C&NW 928 in 1968. It was retired on September 25, 1987 and sold to Washington Corporation in November 1989. It was rebuilt for Corporate Leasing Inc as 3001. It then became MRL 3001 and was later renumbered 220. It was later transferred to I&M Rail Link as 220 in 1997 and sold as Iowa Chicago & Eastern 220 in July 2002. It was retired in February 2007 and scrapped by Jabco Industrial in March 2007.

Scenery: Freight Depot

This past Sunday I started work on the scenery for where my Model Power ‘Freight Depot’ will be residing. I was hoping to originally start my scenery work with the area around North Western Terminal (the parking lot and surrounding areas), but my order for my sidewalks did not arrive on Saturday like it was originally scheduled for. So instead I elected to start on another part of the layout. I already had the ‘Freight Depot’ in hand and knew where I wanted it to go and it would be a good location to test out my scenery skills (it has been a few years since I played around with any of the Woodland Scenics materials). First I applied some Brown craft paint as a base coat for the scenery. Second, I laid out some Brown Fine Ballast to be used as my dirt roads. I plan on using this Brown Fine Ballast for all my dirt roads in the Industrial section of my layout. Third I sprinkled on some Fine Turf in Earth color (trying to avoid the road as much as possible), although...

Coloma Rails - N Scale Model Railroading

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