New Rolling Stock: Atlas TTX Bulkhead Flat Car

I made a trip to one of my two local hobby shops again earlier today just taking a look around for ideas for my office shelf layout. I didn't go in with anything particular in mind, but was happy to come away with a new flat car that I plan to use as part of the scene in front of the commissary building I'm working on.

I've been thinking about making the commissary into a facility for a furniture maker, so there would be a need for inbound freight like wood and paper products. The paper can be brought in with boxcars and the wood with bulkhead flat cars. I chose the TTX road name because it is one that can be seen all over, so it would not look out of place at a fictional facility somewhere in Michigan, which is what I'm going for with this layout.

Atlas Trainman TTX bulkhead flat car #804069

A look at the car fresh out of the box.

A look at the details on the ends of the car.

A look at some of the decals on the sides.

A look at the end and top deck of the flat car.

It is a great looking car and I think it will work perfectly for the office shelf layout. Now I just need to figure out what I am going to do for the wood load. I've seen some pre-made ones online, but they are pricey so I may try to go ahead and make my own. Not sure how to do that just yet, so we'll see what happens.

New Rolling Stock: A Pair of Boxcars from the Hobby Shop

The other day I was out and decided to stop by one of my local hobby shops for a look around. I wasn't there to get anything specific, more so just to see what they had that I could maybe use for my office shelf layout. I didn't really find much I needed right now since I'm still in the planning stages, but I did manage to find a few nice pieces of rolling stock in their discount bins. Each one of them only cost $2.99 so it wasn't a bad deal at all. 

The first one is a 40' Santa Fe boxcar that I plan to use as a display piece along with my yet to be finished C44-9W from back when I was a kid. The two will look nice together on the small display track I built a little while back. 

ATSF Boxcar #49277 from Tyco

The other one was a 40' New Haven boxcar that doesn't really have a specific purpose yet. I will either try to weather it or take it and completely redo the paint job when I get around to coming up with a boxcar scheme for my future proto-freelance railroad. That may not be for a while though.

NH Boxcar #35688 from Tyco

Not bad for $6 all in. Another plus of buying from the local hobby shop is avoiding any shipping charges I would get online. Now that I have these two, it makes me want to get out and buy some more rolling stock to help build my collection. I don't have all that much at the moment.

New Project: Nursery Wall Layout

Before I get to building a full size layout for myself in the basement, I have another small side project to work on. My wife and I have decided to go with trains for the theme of our new nursery, which means I wanted to work in some kind of layout. At first I wanted to do an around the room running setup, but found that would not work out so well. My other option was to do a non-operational display layout on one of the walls. 

Now that I have taken some measurements, I've decided to go with a six foot long layout that will be mounted to the wall. I plan on using five pieces of Atlas 9" straight snap track for the center of the layout along with one piece of Atlas 18" radius snap track at either end. The idea we came up with for each end is to create a false tunnel entrance so it looks like the track leads into the wall. Beyond that, I still need to decide a few things like what locomotive and rolling stock we are going to display as well as what kind of scenery we'd like to have. 

This project is officially under way now that we hit up one of the local hobby shops the other day (Empire Hobbies) and bought the code 100 Atlas track we needed (plus a few extra pieces for myself) and a nice pair stone tunnel portals from Pre-Size Model Specialties. 

(2) Cut Stone Portals, (2) Atlas R18" Snap Track, (10) Atlas 9" Snap Track

Before I start cutting any wood for the shelf that this will sit on, I thought it would be a good idea to sketch out what I wanted this thing to look like. Here's something I threw together in SCARM (Simple Computer Aided Railroad Modeler) as a starting point. It's got the basic track layout, the two portals, and some possible spots for buildings and trees.

2D Track Plan Generated with SCARM

To get a better idea of what this might look like, I used the 3D viewer option in SCARM. Here's what the rendering looks like. It's pretty crude, but definitely helps bring the track plan to life.

3D Rendering Based on 2D Track Plan from SCARM

We aren't looking for anything too complicated here, just something that would look nice on the nursery wall and be a little bit more than just a picture. I've still got some figuring out to do, but this is the general concept and will serve as a guide for the building process.

As a self-imposed deadline, I've got until around December 1st to get this thing built and hung on the wall. In the mean time, I need to decide which era this layout is going to be and what we want as far as a locomotive and rolling stock.