With the contacts all glued

With the contacts all glued into place and some help from some alligator clips and a DC power pack we had this.

Next was to build up more of the kit around the motor and change the boom from the kit to something more prototypical of the CNJ. So I kitbashed an old Athearn crane kit boom and pulleys to the build so far.

Now it's finally starting to look like something.

Wow

Very impressive how smoothly the mechanism moves. I look forward to following your build. As exacting and tedious as this appears to be I'm assuming it will be a "one of" 

Thanks for following along. I

Thanks for following along. I have already showed a few people and they want one. Not sure if they are willing to do it themselves or if it will fall back on me.

I assembled the cab and

I assembled the cab and realized I would have to cut out part of the inside wall to get the boom motor to fit. This is the motor I used.

A little work with a hobby knife and some filing I got it to fit pretty well. I also constructed a little spool out of styrene to attach to the motor with a small screw. Here is what the first spool looked like. I had to cut it down to make it more narrow to make it fit better with some of the other parts I added in later on. You can also see I did a test fit of two mini electronic relays on the floor of the cab on the left. As you can see, there is not a lot of room in the cab.

All of the 24g wiring is temporary, I just wanted to make sure everything would work. I would replace it with the wiring from the decoder as well as addition 30g wire before I buttoned everything up. At this point I was just connecting the wires from the motors to a DC power pack for some test runs.

Figured I might as well see if it would all fit with the roof on as well. I also wanted to come up with a way that would allow me to remove the roof if I needed to after it was all assembled, but more on that later.

Starting to look like something now. Next up was figuring out how to wire a relay to each motor as well as the decoder. After quite a bit of trial and error, asking a few questions to someone who has done this before, and almost burning out a decoder I came up with this. The decoder is a digitrax DZ146. No sound yet, I have some ideas, but I needed a decoder to fit somewhere in the cab with everything else so size matters in this application. 

I can get more technical with the wiring if you ask but basically the common wire goes to one end of the coil, the function wire (in this case green) goes to the other end on the coil, there is also a diode across those two pins so there is no flow back of power to mess up the decoder, the orange motor wire goes to the NO (normally open) contact pin, and the black wire goes to the motor. The gray motor wire from the decoder goes straight to the motor.

Here it is with with exposed wiring and relays but at this point it operates with DCC. Also CVs 5 and 6 were adjusted to keep the voltage to the motors low enough as to not burn out the motors.

Your Idea for sprung pick-ups.

Pogo pins. Just added for clarity, and I didn’t read deep enough. My bad.

options^

After cutting back the wires

After cutting back the wires of the decoder and putting the decoder inside of the wall opposite of the motor I was able to pack everything into the cab with the roof on.

Yes you can still see some of the wire and the motor but I have a plan to cover it up with some interior detail parts in the future.

First I wanted to figure out a way to keep the roof attached and sturdy but still be able to be removed if need be. My solution was very tiny 1mm x 2mm magnets. I added to to the cab roof diagonally from each other and 2 more in the cab walls to match up with them to hold the room securely. They are attached with some CA glue.

For the pickups from the wheels I decided I would try for all wheel pickup. This was accomplished by using 28" intermountain wheelsets that I sanded away the blackening from where the pickups would be. I made an axle pickup for each truck with a small strip of phosphor bronze sheet and a bit of styrene as well as wiper pickups from thin phosphor bronze wire. Both were glued to the trucks using CA glue and the red and black wires were soldered to their appropriate pickup points on the bottom of the chassis. The black to the brass bar that runs the power up though the motor shaft and the red to the bottom of the pogo pin nearest to them. I may run a jumper from one pogo pin to the other at some point depending of how well the pickups work.

I put her on the track and she worked. Also I added a small tungsten weight to the boom arm for smoother operation as well as some tucked away in the cab walls.

Next up will be some lights.

Tiny tiny LEDs

Next up was to add some lights to the crane. I went with the smallest I could find with wires pre attached since I would be using some N scale detail parts for the light fixtures. Specifically 0402 warm white pre wired LEDs from ebay, cal scale GE 44 tonner headlight for the rear light, detail associates N scale large switcher headlights for the from spot lights, and tichy train group N scale lamp reflectors for the light under the boom.

I drilled the required holes in the kit and through the detail parts, threaded the lights as necessary, and wired them to the decoder using some 1k ohm resistors. I decided I wanted to have all of the lights stay on constantly. To get that to happen, since one or the other would turn off depending on which way the crane swung or whether the boom was going up or down, I had to change around a few CVs to get non directional lighting. They now turn on and off using function 3. I want to be able to dim them but couldn't for the life of me figure it out. I know it uses function 4 but it wouldn't dim no matter what CVs I messed with. Anyone have any ideas?

As you can see, not a lot of room to work with here.

I initially had the front lights offset from one another because that's what it looked like in the few pictures I had at first but after finding some more photos of the crane I realized they were both mounted in the same spot so I ended up putting both on top. I don't have any pictures of that at the moment since I'm further ahead in the project then shows here. She's disassembled and getting some more detail parts before paint.

Here is the inaugural run on a loop of EZ track since it's all I have at the moment. I accidentally pulled on the rear light so one of the wires is loose and needs to be reattached, that's why it shuts off early.

But she works!!

All that effort just to be taken apart.

Since everything is operating as intended it was time to disassemble all of my hard work and give the crane a coat of paint. I washed the parts in some soapy water, dried them off with the wife's hair dryer, and let them sit on some paper towels overnight just to make sure all the water was drained out and dried.

Fired up the airbrush and the spray booth and gave it a few coats of Vallejo grey primer and let that dry overnight. The following day I gave a few coats of Vallejo Air black. It was my first time using Vallejo paints. I used their flow improver with the paint 1 drop per 10 of paint since I had to paint quite a few things and didn't want it to dry out to quickly. I had to clean out the airbrush about halfway through since it starting to spit bigger paint drops but it was expected with acrylic paint knowing how quickly they dry. Here's a photo of everything being the same color.

10 out of 10 for the Vallejo paint. Very smooth coverage and very easy bottles to work with. Wish they made more railroad colors but they might be my go to for everything else but we'll see. 

After this it was given a gloss coat of pledge revive it floor polish (previously known as future. clear, pledge floor care, etc.) Still waiting for that to dry and then I can put some decals on it as I get closer and closer to the finished model.

Here we are a day later

A day later we have the decals applied and the grab irons, railings, and the insides of the headlight housings all painted. The grab irons and railings were painted with Testors yellow enamel and the housings were done with Vallejo liquid silver in the white gold color.

The prototype itself was very light on the markings so I thought it would be fairly easy. Not so much, the first set of CNJ herald decals fell apart while sliding them off the decal paper. Luckily I had another set of older ones that worked out. The build date also had to be done by cutting out the numbers individually from a set of caboose numbers and worked into place as well as the "JCF" marking before the build date. I didn't have an F so I had to cut off the bottom part of an E. It worked out surprisingly well I think. What was nice is that in prototype pictures the marking of "JCF 9 8 47" isn't perfectly straight or even so neither is mine.

Some weathering and final assembly.

I decided that before I started final assembly I would do the first bit of weathering only because I figured it would be easier taken apart. I started with a dot fade to fade the color a bit. I went a bit heavy with the white and ended up having to tone it down because it ended up a looking more grey than sun faded. It took a bit to get it to look right but I believe it came together as you can see in the final picture when I started putting it back together.

For the record, this doesn't get easier to take apart and put back together even though I feel like I have done it hundreds of times. With how small and tight of a fit everything is, every part must slide into place with just so before it can all become one unit.

Final assembly

This project has finally come to an end after about two months of work. Here are the pictures of the final product after a bit more weathering and installing couplers and everything else.

And next I started working on the boom/truck car.

Boom Car

The closest gondola that I could find after quite a bit of searching is a Funaro and Camerlengo 50' steel service mill gondola. 

I would have to modify the sides of them so I opted for the completely unassembled kit as opposed to the kit where the body is already assembled. After so measuring, angle finding, cutting, sanding, and gluing here is what I ended up with.

Ingenious Project

Tip of the hat. Very impressive!

Bob

Thanks Bob. Been quite an

Thanks Bob. Been quite an undertaking. 

Continuing on with the boom

Continuing on with the boom car I added a few additional detail parts. After completing the brake rigging underneath I added: stirrups and grab irons, poling pockets, chain hooks and chain, and a more prototypical handbrake for the car. Inside are some tichy train group wreck crane add ons as well as some trucks. Soon it will be ready for paint. 

Crew car

Since the crew car and boom car would be painted the same color i decided to start work on that. I went with a bethlehem car works clerestory coach modelled after the CNJ's fleet of passenger cars. It would need a bit of modification to look more like the prototype shown here.

I would have to block out some of the windows and cut away the end doors.

After taking care of that I dove into bending all of the hand rails by hand out of .0125 phosphor bronze wire from tichy.

From there I glued the body together except for the roof, I wanted that to be removable so I could add an interior and have access to the components for the lights I was going to add.

As you can see I added a few detail parts to the roof and to the end of the car. The marker lights have been drilled out to add lights to as well. For whatever reason I couldn't upload this picture right side up. Oh well.

Into the paint booth went both cars for some primer. Then I used a custom mix of tru color paints to get the desired red. 

Pledge Revive?

Pete,

     I'd like to know how you apply Revive/Future. I've tried spraying it thinned and un-thinned at @ 20psi. The results were not the smooth glass like finish I was expecting. I've hesitated brushing it on as I was concerned about covering up small detail like rivets. Any advice you can give would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Bill Kennedy

future

Hey Bill,

Not only with future/plegde but with almost everything that I paint I like to apply in thicker "wet" coats. I find that when I use mist coats, they tend to come out grainy, not smooth, and are more quick to clog up the airbrush. 

You'll have to practice since you don't want it so thick that it runs and pools in areas but it needs to be applied so that it looks wet and has a great shine to it. Hope that makes sense.

Next we move onto the decals.

Next we move onto the decals. These are a set produced by Raritan Bay Hobbies as well as some miscellaneous Jersey Central decals I had laying around from past projects. 

The "Watch Your Step" decals came from a set produced by K4 decals. They come in a sheet with 4 different styles with different borders and colors. Painting everything perfectly wasn't a high priority to me since this car was going to be pretty heavily weathered.  The grainy satin coat is for the next step, weathering.

Here is the decaled boom car. All from sets of other CNJ decals that I have.

Here is the crew car after an oil dot fade weathering with oil paints. After this a clear coat was applied and followed by a pin wash, some chipping and rust effects, and finally a dull coat.

Here is the finished product. I added operating marker lights by drilling out some cal scale brass marker lights and adding some tiny surface mount LEDs. Then filled the lenses with microscale kristal klear dyed red with a bit of red food coloring.

I also made the headlights operational on either end of the car. All of the lights are able to be turned on and off separately and are controlled by an NCE light it.

Here are just a few more pictures of the finished cars. Next up will be the two tool cars.

Really a great build

Good idea on  how you assembled the Bethlehem Car Works car and had all the hand-holds pre-drilled. Note to self.....

Many railroads kept their wreck trains in immaculate condition. They were an important part of even financially strained companies. The Reading's train positively shined, even when bankrupt. Erie Lackawanna's and Penn Centrals were in pretty good shape too.

CNJ seemed to go its own way!

hand holds

For normal assembly of the kit, you wouldn't have to drill anywhere near as many holes as I did as the vestibules are normally closed off by doors. 

From the pictures I have seen of this train in its later years it was painted boxcar red or maybe even more of a brown and looked to be in better condition. Red it always a quick to fade color in the sun and I'm not entirely sure how long the red lasted. There are very few pictures of this train in general.

Thanks for reading!