July 2024
The year continues to fly by at a record pace…so it seems. Just starting to feel good about things in the personal realm as well. As for the hobbies…well, Athearn has just announced an all-new SD50 in their Genesis line. This engine is re-tooled from the ground up…and includes two Missouri Pacific numbers in the first release. The SD50 is one of my favorite locomotives from my early days in model railroading…as it was new in 1984. I had been in the hobby for 2 years at that time…and the SD50 was first seen by me in the pages of Model Railroader as a kit bash subject since an available model wasn’t on the market back then. MoPac’s SD50’s were delivered in UP yellow/gray…and never wore blue…but they were a nice looking unit for us model railroaders…despite the performance issues they had in the prototype realm.
Athearn seems to have Missouri Pacific modelers’ backs with the plethora of new items coming up each month; so it seems. This new SD50 will feature the a hyper-detailed version of the engines in several road names. Yes, I’ll get some of them. I need to use them to shuttle empty and loaded coal trains between West Frankfort and Salem. I can put my Athearn Genesis UP CA-11 cabooses to work as well; on the markers of said trains. Grateful for the CA-11 too. Athearn has been knocking it out of the park. Thank you to Jack, Janek, John, and all at the Athearn team.
I am building a GP15-1 for friend Jerel Eames in the MP yellow/gray scheme as well. William Brillinger at pdc.ca designed and printed the new canary decals for me and they are designed to fit the hood sides of the Athearn Genesis GP15-1. I will also do MP 1706 for my personal collection in the merger colors of yellow-gray.
I continue to be amazed with the Soundtraxx Tsunami2 decoders and their superb quality. I like the Dynamic Digital Exhaust features and the straight-forward programming capabilities of these decoders. It doesn’t take 45 minutes to download a sound file or program a decoder, either. I’m getting ready to do a couple of Atlas (red box) U23B units with Soundtraxx and Scale Sound System speakers in the near future. I’ve always like the U23B ever since it was released in 1998. It was actually the first “high quality” units I received after purging my blue box fleet back in the mid-1990s. I have been “upgrading” my fleet ever since…and enjoying every new product that is release for my interests.
STL RPM is again upon us. I like attending this show each and every year. Looking forward to seeing what is new this year and plan to take a few models with me for first time in years. We will see. As things continue to settle down, I continue to get more and more relaxed and my hobbies come back to me; along with my creative nature. I’ve built more locomotives this past and present year (albeit for other modelers) than I have in DECADES. However, I am going to use more RTR equipment than ever now…as I want to run my trains and BUILD my layout. So, I’ll go with the higher quality items as they are released; and will be able to enjoy them at a faster pace than taking each item apart; stripping; and repainting it.
I hope all of you have a safe 4th of July weekend. Until the dog days of August are upon us…
