Here’s the reworked 20, with taller pilots and improved headlights.
Having recently finished building NS&T 17 – the last of my freight motors for the Niagara St. Catharines & Toronto Railway – I decided it was time to address some problems with another freight motor that have been a low-grade annoyance for almost two years.
The issue was NS&T 20, which I built in the summer of 2022. For some reason, I got the size of the sheet metal pilots wrong, resulting in footboards that rode much too high.
I didn’t notice until well after I’d painted the model and applied the stripes – and at that point, I was too disheartened by the mistake. I thought it would require a lot of work to address it. At the same time, I was less-than-thrilled by how the headlights looked: I’d installed the bulbs from the back of the headlight castings, and the wires sticking out the back and running into the tops of the hoods looked very “1970s brass steam”.
When I built NS&T 17, I got both of these details correct, and while 17 and 20 are different in many details, they are both steeple-cab designs – and when spotted next to each other the errors on number 20 were even more glaring. I realized the pain to fix it was a small price to pay compared to the ongoing frustration of leaving it alone.
Over the weekend I unsoldered the footboards, added braces behind the sheets, then soldering 0.100″ wide pieces of brass strip to the bottom of each existing pilot. I then reattached the footboards in their new – correct – lower position. The process involved sanding away paint to expose bare brass for soldering, then carefully spot-painting, applying new stripes, and finishing with some weathering to blend the old work and the new. I need to do a bit more weathering to blend things properly, but I’ll save that for a time when I’m spraying a bunch of equipment.
I also reworked the two hood-mounted headlamps. For each, I removed the casting from its bracket, drilled the bottom of the casting for a light bulb, filled the hole on the back of the casting, then repainted. I then re-mounted the castings and installed new bulbs from underneath.
I did not take pictures. I hate having to rework things and – frankly – I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible so I could go back to more enjoyable projects. That said, I’m much happier with how NS&T 20 looks now, and glad I finally corrected the problems.
Now to give the rest of the fleet a critical review…
The Model Railway Show 