07-17-2011, 10:00 AM
Aarrrggghhhh! A brass GP30...ok...now you're killing me! 
If I could find and afford the Nscale brass high hood that came out years ago...I'd snap it up...but they're rarer than the braces used to straighten hen's teeth nowadays. I'm still regretting not purchasing the HO high hood version when it came out, just to have one on display. Thankfully, we live close enough to the NC Transportation Museum to get pictures and a ride in the real thing every few years. That museum btw is a great place for finding current pictures of these engines. (And a great place to visit if you're making vacation plans.) There's plenty of great websites out there dedicated to the Southern Railway with many good shots and various perspectives to help correctly model an engine or car, so you should have no trouble finding a suitable prototype to help improve the look of that brass engine.
I keep hoping that one day Atlas will change their tooling just enough to produce a run of high hood GP30's. Granted, they'd have a limited amount of modelers that would buy either the N&W, Southern, or NS versions of the engine...but they've made other railroad names that are more particular and lesser-modeled, so maybe there's hope yet.
I was looking over your layout again and was thinking about the "what if's"...and thought...if I was my layout, what would I add? And it hit me...a transfer table servicing an engine or car maintenance building. A small operation with one or two tracks, limiting the overall footprint of the facility, but throwing open the possibility of adding "guest power" to the layout from the mainline tracks that could add switching problems where you need to get repaired engines out while maintaining your schedule around the industries. Not that you were asking for ideas...
If I could find and afford the Nscale brass high hood that came out years ago...I'd snap it up...but they're rarer than the braces used to straighten hen's teeth nowadays. I'm still regretting not purchasing the HO high hood version when it came out, just to have one on display. Thankfully, we live close enough to the NC Transportation Museum to get pictures and a ride in the real thing every few years. That museum btw is a great place for finding current pictures of these engines. (And a great place to visit if you're making vacation plans.) There's plenty of great websites out there dedicated to the Southern Railway with many good shots and various perspectives to help correctly model an engine or car, so you should have no trouble finding a suitable prototype to help improve the look of that brass engine.
I keep hoping that one day Atlas will change their tooling just enough to produce a run of high hood GP30's. Granted, they'd have a limited amount of modelers that would buy either the N&W, Southern, or NS versions of the engine...but they've made other railroad names that are more particular and lesser-modeled, so maybe there's hope yet.
I was looking over your layout again and was thinking about the "what if's"...and thought...if I was my layout, what would I add? And it hit me...a transfer table servicing an engine or car maintenance building. A small operation with one or two tracks, limiting the overall footprint of the facility, but throwing open the possibility of adding "guest power" to the layout from the mainline tracks that could add switching problems where you need to get repaired engines out while maintaining your schedule around the industries. Not that you were asking for ideas...
Mark
Citation Latitude Captain
--and--
Lt Colonel, USAF (Retired)
Citation Latitude Captain
--and--
Lt Colonel, USAF (Retired)