Nice photo as usual, Eric--neat detail. Your close-ups still make me jealous, LOL! Rex--Sawmill Ridge really looks cool--and I really like your yard. But I bet you end up with more than 150 trees, believe me. I thought I was just going to 'dot' the top of the Sierra Buttes with some small evergreen, I ended up using a ton of the little dears, and that was just to give an impression of growth. Trees are like that--you just keep running out!
Okay, here's a curiosity that I picked up at my LHS. It's an M.B.Austin brass model of a Santa Fe 3100 series 2-8-2. Now that might not seem quite so unusual, but this model dates from the early to mid 1950's, and except for the bell and the trailing truck, I can't find an actual brass casting on it. The locomotive seems to be entirely made up of turned and fitted sheet or tube brass. I don't know whether the tender is original or not--I know the tender trucks are WAY too new for the tender body. It's got the original motor, runs okay, but noisy, and the gearing is REALLY high for a freight loco. I think I'm going to replace the motor with a NWSL can. I already put Tomar track-sliders on the loco and tender, and improved the slow speed a little. I got it for a song, and I wouldn't have bothered in the first place, except that the age of the loco fascinated me. I mean, this loco is probably older than a lot of guys on this website!!
Anyway, here she is.
If anyone out there has an exact manufacture date for this loco, I'd sure appreciate hearing about it.
Tom