A quick question for you Old Heads out there:

I'm trying to sell two 20 year old Athearn diesel locomotives.  I think they are both new old stock.  But looking in the boxes there are no add-on parts like handrails or brake cylinders.  There are a couple of wires that look like they may be handrails.  But there is a list of these kind of parts under a sidebar to the exploded parts diagram labeled "Additional Parts."

Picked up a Scale Trains Operator w/DC only. Installed a TCS-T1 decoder in it that I had laying around.  Put it in a consist in the lead for the lighting effects with a sound unit trailing. Headlight is nice and bright, but can't get the ditch lights to work.

I am thinking maybe remove the wiring from the board going to the ditch lights and attach to new decoder. T1 says it's a two function. Does that mean the green & purple wires are of no use?

Back in the day, I purchased a number of Thrall All Door Boxcars from Walthers. Since I'm trying to model relatively contemporary, many of those cars are no longer usable in their current form. So either I sell them (limited market for them) or do something with them. Modifying them to what some of them became is beyond my current skillset. But painting them in a still in use paint scheme might be possible. NOKL has a number of them still in service for specialized wood products. Their paint scheme is a basic brown (box car red?) solid color. Nominal data on the cars.

We all have different approaches to our modeling from strict prototype to protolance to several different degrees of freelancing. I fall firmly as a freelancer but not to the extreme of "run anything", I do strive for at least a modicum of plausibility as far as trying to run the same era of equipment on my layout. I'm not super strict but I generally think of my logging and mining layouts time frame as anywhere in a range of about 1918 to 1925.