2025 was a good year for ribbons.

[Iron Horseman]

Trying to being active in three NMRA divisions, the Boulder Model Railroad Club, and the Colorado Model Railroad Museum is hard and getting harder. And I think I burnt myself out. Rushing each month to prepare entries lost not only some of the joy but some of the model quality I usually try to achieve.

Anyway the year started with the NMRA show in Wichita Kansas where I entered 4 items and came home with 4 blue ribbons. Sorry no pictures they are all packed back up now.

The Boulder Club is where things happened. The club has a monthly themed contest, and I've entered on and off through the years never gave it too much thought. There are two levels of entry they call Tier 1 (beginners) and Tier 2 (advanced). At the end of the year all the monthly winners compete for the annual "Model of the Year". To enter Tier 2 one has to win the yearly. ... It started in February when I had to be in my office in Colorado the week of the club meeting. I knew the theme so I took stuff with me to the office and made up an entry. I won and thought, game on. I can get to Tier II level. If I win all the monthlies I can't loose the yearly - Right? Not right, but I didn't know that at the time. So I worked really hard and won most of the months. Turns out there is not a "model of the year - tier I" and "model of the year - tier II" so a Tier I model has to beat all the advanced models as well. I did not win that. Lost to a scratch built O-scale Caboose. It was a true work of art and modeling ability so I don't feel bad at all. What I did win was "Modeler of the Year", which not only lets me compete in Tier II, it requires it.

Here is the family picture. Believe it or not there is a story behind each one.

 

[Rico]

Very nice work, congrats!
I’ve only ever entered one contest, lost to an RTR car with zero work done to it.
Turned out to be the Presidents kid.

 

[migalyto]

Congratulations!

As a present day modeler, I especially like the BNSF hopper!

 

[Bruette]

Here is the family picture.

Congratulations!

Believe it or not there is a story behind each one.

I most certainly believe it, and I would love to hear each one!

 

[Iron Horseman]

I most certainly believe it, and I would love to hear each one!

If others feel the same way, I can certainly post them.

 

[Bruette]

If others feel the same way, I can certainly post them.

Rico likes it, others will too!

 

[Iron Horseman]

First a little more background. I live in Kansas, my office is 550 miles away in Louisville Colorado. The Boulder Model Railroad club meets in Louisville a bit more than a mile away from the office. By coincidence, the office had required our physical presence in the office for the week that the model railroad club meeting was held. I knew that fairly well in advance so I decide to make an entry for the February contest. The theme was "load on a flat car or gondola".

I took the emphasis was obviously on the "load" part not the flat or gondola, so I rummaged through my stuff and found an Athearn Blue box flat car and built it up. I did all the normal things of putting on Kadee couplers and metal wheel sets. I then sanded the deck to give it some groves and make it look like wood, weathered the car and it was a good enough base for my load. There was the problem. I for the life of me could not come up with a good load.

Tried to paint soda straws and make them look like pipes - epic failure on both counts that plastic does not take paint well, and the paper ones have that swirled seam through them. Besides even after that they are too mushy to chain (even fake chain) to the car. I tried blocks of rock to be quarry material, toy cars and trucks. Had a couple tractors that looked good but I only had 3 and a 50 foot flat car would have been loaded with at least 8. Could not find any more of those. Tried other various pipes and tubes painted grey to look like cement pipes. All the wrong size or just looked 'not right'.

This goes on and on, such that I left for the office and just took the flat car and all my glues and things with me hoping I would have some brain storm. No brain storm, just a real snow storm that limited going to junk stores looking for fodder. Day of the meeting I realized I could look through the "junk" box of the office model railroad (yes most people don't have a model railroad in their office but I do). Sure enough I found some old bridge bents. They weren't quite long enough, so I decided to pretend the load was going out to do a repair after an accident. I snagged one of the signal shacks directly off the layout and fastened them to the flat. Used some shaved match sticks for blocks. I found the hardest part was making the chain look like it was tight. I also added some of that elasticky "wire" to simulate more cables holding the loads on. Should have put chocks on the beams too but... Ta Da I had a last minute entry.

 

[Iron Horseman]

Turns out that no one entered the contest in January so I have 100% of the entries for the annual award! That inspired me to enter the March contest. The theme was "Weathered Freight Car with no graffiti".

Here I knew I was ahead of the game because the contest is weathering not building the car. Yay, and about 10 years ago the Greeley Model Railroad Museum had ordered a fleet of the Broadway Limited stock cars. They wanted them weathered, and I volunteered to do 1.

It was the first car I ever weathered seriously. I'd seen too many weathered cars that look like someone threw brown paint on them and brushed it off. I really did not want that, nor to make it look like a rust bucket. The car was Union Pacific and I tore into the research to see what they looked like in real life. Turns out they mostly faded. So I started with misting coats of white and tan. Then I did washes of alternating burnt umber and white again. Opened the car and did the interior with proper worn out wood grey and straw. Finished off with a fine brush of acrylic rust, various browns, and more white. It came out fantastic, and when I took it back to the museum, they asked me to weather all the other new stock cars they had acquired.

All I had to do was go to the museum and pick it up. Note my Kansas situation again. The museum is 620 miles from my house. Hmmmm. Fortunately, fate intervened again and I had to be present in my office again. So instead of going home on Friday night like normal, I spent the night and went to the museum on Saturday. Was able to log some volunteer hours and pick up the car. The catch is, it was not in its normal train. Groan. I looked through every train, all the yards, all the staging, no car. Almost an hour later I finally found it in a storage box over the work bench. Someone brought it in to see if it could be converted to sound. So I snagged it and dropped it off at my friends house to enter into the contest later in the month.

I included a photo of a prototype for the judges to use as a comparison. One thing I learned was the paint is not arbitrary. Union Pacific painted cars with roller bearing trucks with silver tops and ends! who knew? Now since it won, I want to keep it and have to find a replacement for the museum.

 

[Bruette]

There’s often an interesting story behind almost every success, and yours truly live up to that. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Iron Horseman]

Once again, I thought the April contest would be easy. The Theme was "A railcar for conveying passengers". Earlier (like 20 years ago) I started a project to make Santa Fe railroad cabbage cars. A cabbage is a coach, caboose, baggage car. They were used on mixed trains throughout the system. As heavy weight passenger cars were retired, the Santa Fe shops converted them. As such almost everyone is different making them hard to model. I started the project using the Bachmann combine, an AHM coach, an AHM combine, and the Rivarossi Milwaukee road combine.

Another whole story here but the short of it is that all the cars had issues, the Rivarossi car was too short, the Bachmann and the AHM combines were too long, and the AHM coach windows were way off. I spent months cutting frames and bodies down, refitting, filling some windows and cutting others. Ended up with 4 pretty good cars.

All I had to do was find one and enter it in the contest - right? Of course not right. These cars had all been in Denver so in the move they were packed up in a box, now stored somewhere in the school house. Don't just mean a few boxes - hundreds of boxes spread over the entire school. Also note the school house is 2 hours away from my live in house. Fate intervened again, and my son called and said the hot water tank had quit working, so I had to go to the school house to install a new one anyway. While I was there I took an extra day to hunt for the car.

Next part of the story is that I found one of them, and it had not survived the move well. All the roof stacks were broken off, hand rails and stirrups were bent or broken, and I had never quite finished it. It didn't even have decals. And now I am in a panic. The contest is just a bit more than 2 weeks. Order decals from the historical society, order some other parts, hope they get here on time. Fix or fabricate new stove and bathroom roof vents, repaint...... Still didn't get the marker lamps on and roof isn't fitting exactly right over the modified interior so it looks like the windows are open a crack. But, out of time, so on Monday throw the car into the 2-day postal service and hope it gets there on time. It did.

 

[Iron Horseman]

For May and June the themes were "an open hopper without load" and "a ice hatch reefer". I was going to enter a "Sealy" hopper, the kind with the manual crank on the side for opening the bays, and a Santa Fe "ice service" car. Unfortunately my friend who I had been mailing these to so he could enter them for me was attending the NMRA Regional Convention in Durango, and the NMRA National Convention in Novi respectively. So I had no way to enter without driving all 550 miles. That would have been 2200 miles total, 32 hours, and about $500 in fuel. Nope not going to happen.

Fast forward to July, I got confused. I did drive the 550 miles because my friend was now at the Narrow Gauge Convention, and I had my entry ready..... After driving all day, I walked into the meeting only to find that everyone was putting out pictures instead of graffiti freight cars. I had confused the dates graffiti was the August theme. Groan.

The theme for July was "A personal photo of a Colorado railroad subject". Fortunately all was not lost. I just happened to have some of my photos hanging on the wall in my office just over a mile a way. So I ran over and grabbed one off the wall. Before I've titled it "Coming Round the Mountain" but this time I titled it "Take Me to the Fair" as it was the UP excursion train to the Colorado State Fair in 2007. The train is southbound on the joint-line just south of Castle Rock Colorado. The picture looked a little strange among all the 8x10s and 8x12s, because it was wall size 20"x30". I firmly believe size does matter and it won.

Funny side note to this picture. Notice the D&RGW Heritage unit. During this time period, my friend who was a D&RGW foamer, was also the Union Pacific Southern Colorado Division Superintendent. Once that unit reached his division he would not let it go. It was only assigned to trains that ran within the Division. He wanted to keep it on "home" rails.

 

[Rico]

Great picture and story!

 

[BigGRacing]

Outstanding work! Congratulations on all those ribbons!

 

[Iron Horseman]

Very nice work, congrats!
I’ve only ever entered one contest, lost to an RTR car with zero work done to it.
Turned out to be the Presidents kid.

Yes, that is a problem at all levels of competition. The agreement is usually "It has to be mostly your own work". Yet even at the Santa Fe Historical and Modeling Society convention, there have been entries that are obviously open the box and put it on the contest card.

 

[Iron Horseman]

When the list of themes came out, I saw one of them was "weathered freight car WITH graffiti". My initial thought was that I don't like to "celebrate" or "condone" graffiti, so I'll just skip that one. That was before I started winning and got the "have to win this thing" mind set. This was in March, so I put out the word in chat and facebook that I was looking for a car to model. The pictures started coming in, but yawn, nothing was catching my eye. There was one with a cowboy, but still..... Then a few days later just driving home from the store a BNSF train came charging by us, and there it was, bug eyes and all. The "Ah Chihuahua". Everyone in the car immediately liked it, so I chased it down and got some photos.

When I got home I immediately started hunting for a model of the car. Bachmann had just come out with one in HO scale, but I decided to go with an almost match of an O-scale Atlas Master car. I figured the larger size would be easier to do, it would look more impressive to the judges, and perhaps no one would know it was my entry since everything else I've entered was in HO.

First job was to weather it to match. I lightly sanded to get the fading logo look and did my signature white mist just to dull it down. I said almost match because some of the cars prototype markings weren't the same, most notably my car had white reflectors I had to change to yellow. Easy fix but just more "stuff" to do. My original thought was to make a decal for the graffiti and use on one side, and hand paint on the other. I got white decal paper and did that. Trimmed it right up so the white would only show on the edges of the letters. Then I got the correct colors of the acrylic and brush painted. Horrifically tedious and finicky. Paint too thick and shows brush strokes, paint to thin and runs into an joining color, etc. Can't count how many mistakes I made and had to "erase" by sucking the paint back off. Another side note here, with my normal daily schedule, most of the work done (on all these not just this one) is between 11 pm and 2 am, so I am falling asleep on the chihuahua making more mistakes! argh.

When I "finished" by basically saying best I can do, I was very disappointed with it. For some reason my wife was still up (very unusual), I took it up and set it on the breakfast table, mumbled something about "well here it is", turned and headed to bed. Next thing I knew, I was hearing raving from the kitchen. My wife was going nuts over how well I had done and how good it looked etc. I was puzzled. However; the next morning when I looked at it with fresh eyes, I had to agree with her. While I was doing it I knew all the mistakes, foibles, and issues with it, so at the time those were all I could see. Stepping back and looking at the over all "whole" effect thing it was very nice. So nice I decided NOT to decal the other side, and ran it to Denver (oops August story above). When September finally came it brought home the blue. I missed the meeting but heard it got mountains of praises from everyone. It is the one I eventually entered into the "model of the year" contest where it lost to the scratch built caboose.

 

[Colorado Midland Modeler]

When the list of themes came out, I saw one of them was "weathered freight car WITH graffiti". My initial thought was that I don't like to "celebrate" or "condone" graffiti, so I'll just skip that one. That was before I started winning and got the "have to win this thing" mind set. This was in March, so I put out the word in chat and facebook that I was looking for a car to model. The pictures started coming in, but yawn, nothing was catching my eye. There was one with a cowboy, but still..... Then a few days later just driving home from the store a BNSF train came charging by us, and there it was, bug eyes and all. The "Ah Chihuahua". Everyone in the car immediately liked it, so I chased it down and got some photos.View attachment 259957

When I got home I immediately started hunting for a model of the car. Bachmann had just come out with one in HO scale, but I decided to go with an almost match of an O-scale Atlas Master car. I figured the larger size would be easier to do, it would look more impressive to the judges, and perhaps no one would know it was my entry since everything else I've entered was in HO.

First job was to weather it to match. I lightly sanded to get the fading logo look and did my signature white mist just to dull it down. I said almost match because some of the cars prototype markings weren't the same, most notably my car had white reflectors I had to change to yellow. Easy fix but just more "stuff" to do. My original thought was to make a decal for the graffiti and use on one side, and hand paint on the other. I got white decal paper and did that. Trimmed it right up so the white would only show on the edges of the letters. Then I got the correct colors of the acrylic and brush painted. Horrifically tedious and finicky. Paint too thick and shows brush strokes, paint to thin and runs into an joining color, etc. Can't count how many mistakes I made and had to "erase" by sucking the paint back off. Another side note here, with my normal daily schedule, most of the work done (on all these not just this one) is between 11 pm and 2 am, so I am falling asleep on the chihuahua making more mistakes! argh.

When I "finished" by basically saying best I can do, I was very disappointed with it. For some reason my wife was still up (very unusual), I took it up and set it on the breakfast table, mumbled something about "well here it is", turned and headed to bed. Next thing I knew, I was hearing raving from the kitchen. My wife was going nuts over how well I had done and how good it looked etc. I was puzzled. However; the next morning when I looked at it with fresh eyes, I had to agree with her. While I was doing it I knew all the mistakes, foibles, and issues with it, so at the time those were all I could see. Stepping back and looking at the over all "whole" effect thing it was very nice. So nice I decided NOT to decal the other side, and ran it to Denver (oops August story above). When September finally came it brought home the blue. I missed the meeting but heard it got mountains of praises from everyone. It is the one I eventually entered into the "model of the year" contest where it lost to the scratch built caboose.

View attachment 259958

That is impressive! I'm usually not a fan of graffiti, but this I like a lot. Great job!

 

[Iron Horseman]

I've now got 5 of the 7 first places covered, so got to keep it up. The topic for September was "MOW", and I got nothing. I once had a wooden Ulrich kit of track cleaning car, but it has disintegrated over the years. Rummaging through a box I found a Tichy-Trains 120ton crane, hmm what's this I have two? Anyway, having nothing else I tore into building the kit.

First part of the kit is the boom. Ok built and set aside. Base, built and set aside. The cabin part proved much more difficult. Tiny parts that broke if one looked at the crosswise. Hand rails all over the place. Sooooo many holes to mount the pieces into. Other parts that had to fit "just so". Had to fabricate a couple parts that I had broken, and use an alternate hole for one hand rail but I got it with only a couple mistakes. I thought the hardest part was over, but then got to the pulleys. These are real pulleys that have to be able to turn so one cannot just slather glue all over them. The glue can only be on the axle part. I think I spent about an hour for each one. Under the magnifying glass with tweezers was exhausting.

Paint the parts and let them dry. Begin final assembly. Body onto base. Boom onto body. Wait a minute. Somethings wrong here. The boom is backwards, turn it over, it is still backwards what the heck? Figured out that I had put top and bottom on wrong inverted. Cement dried three days ago, it is ruined. PANIC. Wait minute again, as noted above I just happen to have two of these kits, so rummage through the box again and snag the boom parts out of the other kit. Looked at the directions very carefully and promptly made exactly the same mistake. Fortunately this time I caught it after only about an hour and I was able to wrench the half melted styrene apart and put them on correctly. Whew that was close.

So now the final thing, thread the cable that holds the boom up. Directions say, "see diagram". Three tries later I got it right. Even so here is the catch. There is no weight in the boom. Every jostle allows the thread "cable" to jump out of the pulleys and get tangled up. Out come the tweezers again. Knowing this would be a problem, I took them with me to the meeting. Got there early and spent about 15 minutes aligning them all properly. I un-prototypical painted spokes and other things just to show off the details. Made a "midnight run" to a friends house to get the decals.

 

[Iron Horseman]

The topic for September was "baggage car, express reefer, or less than car load box or express car". I did ask for clarification and the answer was the emphasis was on the "express" part, so don't enter something with freight trucks. Well what do I do here, another cabbage? Probably not a good choice. I have piles of all these types of cars but most are RTR that I did not of the work on. I've got a PV&W baggage but all I did there was paint it. I figured the only way was to detail one up.

Easier to detail a small car, so I started with a Sierra Railway baggage only 34' long. Found a picture of the Sierra Railway combined car and used it as an example. I added the hand rails, and redid the platform rails to include a chain across the center, added truck keeper chains, and a chain under the coupler??! No idea what it's function is but it was there in the photo so I added it. I was going to add grab iron ladder up one side but ran out of time so now there is just a single one all by its lonesome on the roof with nothing leading to it. I figured I would add an interior and one of the things was a pot belly stove. Had to add a chimney to the roof and make sure it lined up with the stove inside. I found someone had done a 3d printing of an interior for this car so I grabbed that up and painted it. The material used for the 3d printing did not want to take paint. Had a heck of a time and ended up with streaking, brush strokes, bobs, not smooth ... argh. I wanted the floor to look used, stained, worn, but even that didn't come out well. Looks even worse in the photos. Painted (same not good results) and added a few more interior details (you might notice the an extra hook left over from the crane) and called it good. Told my friend to display with the roof off.

 

[Iron Horseman]

At this point, I've won 9 of the monthly's, one month had zero entries, so so far only 2 to compete against. PLUS November. Theme is Caboose. Caboose is always a really hard one. Everyone likes caboose, so there are always lots of entries. Caboose entries are always fantastic, with so many grab irons, and guy wires, ladders, cupola details, marker lamps, plus the interior. Lots, and lots of possible detail options. I thought about all sorts of things, bigger is better so G-gauge. But bigger means any mistake in the detail is more "in your face". Tiny is cute, especially in caboose. Z-scale. hmmm, very expensive. No time to build one from scratch, and I don't have any caboose craftsman type kits sitting around not even in my train warehouse..... Pondering for about two weeks I decided to go a completely different direction.

At the July meeting I won a raffle item and I choose a MARX O-27 train set. There was a caboose in there that I decided to not only restore but make better. I decided to the exterior add roof walks, add a 2nd coupler, add a 2nd roof ladder, add a chimney, and marker lamps. To the interior add some seating a pot belly stove to go with the chimney, and what ever else I could think of. As it is tin-plate, I wanted to keep it's heritage feel, so I made a rule that I could not use anything or any materials unavailable when it was in the Marx catalog in 1957. The only exception was electronics. I could have easily plopped one of those period appropriate large bulbs that generates enough heat to cook and egg and uses enough power for an entire N-scale layout. Nope, I was going to use LEDs. So other than that, no plastic, no styrene, 3d printed stuff, etc.

I ordered an O-scale stove, bench, desk, coffee pot, and a couple crewmen all in pewter or lead. Since this is tin-plate there are little slots and tabs for removing parts, and there must have been millions of these caboose made because it was easy to find others to get the end ladder and coupler from. Not quite so fast, I soon found out there are at least 4 different ways Marx mounted their couplers. And none of the caboose had real roof walks only painted on. To solve that problem I found a box car with a raised roof and cut it off. Originally I did the very difficult cuts so that it would have tabs to use to attach to the caboose. Later I found it is entirely too hard to cut the slots for the new tabs so I ended up folding them under and using as glue points instead. Totally disassembled the caboose and cleaned it all up. Once again because of the tab construction it was easy to replace a really badly damaged body piece with a different one from a "parts" caboose.

The stove, and figures arrived and they are HUGE. That's right. This isn't an O-scale caboose, it is a selectively compressed O-27 "model". So I went back and re-ordered all the same things only in S-scale. I then used cardboard to make the interior walls. Microscope slides for real glass windows, and painted the interior institutional green. Added LED lighting on the ceiling, and there were pre-cut holes on the end that just happen to fit 3mm red LEDs for marker lamps on either side. I put a real battery box under the floor and a switch that selects which markers are on.

Fixing the red paint was fun. The color I got didn't match after it dried. So I bought 7? different red colors and put a sample patch on some white paper. After they dried I did the sample match. Apple red ended up being the match. It was definitely a different set of modeling skills. And it got 3rd place.

 

[BigGRacing]

Fixing the red paint was fun. The color I got didn't match after it dried. So I bought 7? different red colors and put a sample patch on some white paper. After they dried I did the sample match. Apple red ended up being the match.

It turned out awesome, great work!