I picked this up at a swap meet this weekend. The guy told me it was a RS1500DC. Oh? I can't find a thing on the net if such animal ever existed and I don't think it did. What do the experts say. From the chassis it looks like an Athearn product, but I don't ever recall an Athearn producing such a thing.

I recently purchased this engine. It was advertised as DCC ready, but is in fact DCC on board, so bonus!

However, when i went to check it out, I found out something the owner didn't know. There was some jimmy rigging on the tender itself for whatever reason.

I am converting my coal burning Consolidation to an oil burner while my daughters are doing spin art. Disassembly of the Bachmann 2-8-0’s tender is a bit more complicated than I expected. First you have to unscrew the screws that hold on the trucks. You also have to remove the handrails from the front of the tender, then place a VERY thin screwdriver into the mounting hole for the truck and push the screwdriver into the tender to push the top off. Once you have the tender separated, carefully remove the back of the coal bunker from the coal pile.

3D printing consists of layers being stack one on top of the other. This gave me an idea. The roofs of boxcabs have a very shallow curve to their roofs. It's kind of hard to get the right profile over a length of 3 inches or more. While I was working on my boxcabs for the HOn30 quarry line the roofs keep falling off. As i was looking at them I was thinking there has to be a better way. I think I found the answer in the etched kits so popular in Britain. I snagged a kit that was/is produced in Canada. The picture below shows the chassis.