New Athearn releases

Athearn today officially announced the DD40AX locomotive in HO, as well as SD45 and GP38-2 models, along with some freight cars. N scale sees the release of freight cars only at this point.
go to www.athearn.com for pricing and availability.

Switch mechanisms

A modeling friend of mine, has recently posted his solution to building a manual turnout mechanism for his layout.  The video is below. Great work Mike!

New Exactrail product announcements

While I recently had to report that the Exact Rail C50-7 caboose was not going to be produced at this time, they recently announced a re-run of several freight cars. No new models, but new road numbers, and they should be available starting March 15th.
In HO scale, these are:
- Gunderson 7466 woodchip car in various roadnames
- Milwaukee 40' ribside box car
- A Vert-A-Pac autorack car various roads
- PC&F Hy-cube box car

In N scale they announced a Gunderson 5200 box car in various road names. See your dealer for prices and availability.

Southern Pacific SD9

The SD9 locomotive has always been one of my favourite US locos. Nicknamed the 'Caddies', which in itself is a nickname for Caddilac, because of their comfortable ride qualities, they were a very succesful and reliable locomotive, many of which have done service for many decades, and even today some SD9's are still operating on some short lines and industries. Not bad for a loco which first saw service in 1955! The CFNR also owned 4 , two were ex C&NW , while the second two were ex SP SD9E's. The SD9E's were a re-build locomotive, that had several modifications done by the SP. I've now started detail my old Athearn SD9, converting it to an SD9E, and then it will be painted in CFNR colours, and will be given roadnumber 203. The other ex SP SD9 was number 202, but that loco was originally SP 4319, which was a snow fighting locomotive. I know a friend of mine who likes modeling these snowfighting locos, and may have plans to build 4319, and I don't want my 202 to show up on the same layout next to his 4319, as they were the same loco, so I'm basing mine on 4331, which became CFNR 203. Here's a picture of my early start of the project, and of the original loco 4331, and finally as CFNR 203. I'm not sure who took these prototype pictures, if you read this, let me know and I'll credit you accordingly. As always, clicking on a picture brings up a larger one in a new window.

Exactrail caboose not in production

Last year Exact Rail announced they were intending to manufactur a HO model of the SP C50-7 caboose. I pre-ordered one too, however they've now announced they won't be putting the model in production after all, at least not for now. However, my consolidation is, that Athearn has shown a test sample of the same bay window caboose in their genesis range at a train show recently. I wonder if Athearn's intention of producing the caboose made Exact Rail decide, not to produce one, as Athearn is a bigger company. I also wouldn't be surprised if Exact Rail actually helped Athearn developing their model, they've done a lot for them in the past, so perhaps this is how it all pans out. Time will tell.