Turning around the corner with a big 61'6" interurban

Some may be afraid if this big cars could really negociate sharp curves. They can. I tried a 138 mm radius, about 5.5 inch. It works, and there may be always a small reserve. This is a prototypical radius of slightly under 40'.

The only adapation to be done is cutting the 4 upper corner edges of the NWSL Stanton drive with a cutting knife.

Somewhere between Laporte and Goshen ...

My Northern Indiana Interurban Combine, freshly painted in "Traction Orange"... and weathered.

Cincinnati Wooden Combine H0 kit

For those who are tempted by the adventure, the Cincinnati Wooden Combine is now offered for sale als a resin printed kit via i.materialise.

First in his Northern Indiana version.

The car is split in three parts:

1. the carbody with pilot, rear doorsteps and radial coupler.

item # CCC1001

2. The frame with underbody equipment, ready for two NWSL Stanton drives.

item # CCC2001

3. The truck frames. Two models of Baldwin MCB frames are available for this car (Order always a pair ;-) :

with straight outer ends #BDW7901

or with depressed ends #BDW8001

Required NWSL Stanton drives are of type 1210, with 7' wheelbase and 36" wheels.

This car kit is not "ready to run", but "ready to finish" with immediate pleasure. After cleaning of the resin shells, I have made the basic model run in one hour on his NWSL Stanton drives. After this inaugural running, you will unmount the car again and make the final detailaing work.

Only few parts must be added of your own: The truss rods made of .5 mm piano wire. And the curved end window handrails made of .3 copper or brass wire.

You will add also two trolley poles and pole hooks. If you want to operate the radial coupler, it is time also to mount it. 

I have all this tried out myself, and as I am a far better computer designer than field modeler, don't be too afraid. For all this steps I have already published small "howtos" here in the blog. But as they are dispersed, I will put them a little together soon.

Don't hesitate to ask for further information about this model.

Northern Indiana 300 Combine in H0 scale

The Northern Indiana 300 combines had a different window arrangement as the sister cars from Terre Haute or the Ohio Electric combines.

The oval window was situated at the rear and the baggage compartment was a little shorter. For this reason the heater and his chimney was moved a little forward. 

The Northern Indiana Cars had also a slightly different unterbody arrangement, the resistor bank was located in the center axis.

The frame is ready made for two NWSL Stanton drives 1210 (item #39278-4). 

Baldwin MCB truck frames for this drives were resin printed in the same "Prime Gray" material by i.materialise in Belgium. 

New printed traction models out of the box

Cincinnati Car Co. Wooden Combines

I got mail. Two newly printed wooden combines arrived from Belgium, very pretty realised by i.materialise.

The first is the slightly upgraded Terre Haute Indianapolis & Eastern car. The second is a Northern Indiana combine, who had an inversed window arrangement with oval window in the rear.

Both cars have their own frames with different underbody equipments and have also different Baldwin trucks.

More soon...

How not to loose control over your traction cars

CCCo Wooden Combine: Northern Indiana (green) and Terre Haute (red)

3D drawing is computer drawing. This means that you will meet a point where things will get out of control if you can no longer track all the trunks of your project properly. I am there...

3D printing is a tricky affair, and a minor error in one of the hundreds (or thousands) of elements will make the whole file unusable.

So I put things in order and separated the Cincicinnati Car Co.Wooden Combine into several parts :

- A common base used for all variations (grey)
- An additional pack for one given version (green, red, ...)

Now I have merged the Terre Haute version (red) and the Northern Indiana version (green) in one master file. For one print project, the common base (grey) plus one individual package is exported into an STL file. On both showed versions, the side walls, the clerestory windows, the pilot, the rear roof mat and the chimney are not the same or missing. As this car was built or rebuilt to so many versions for Indiana and Ohio lines, several dozen individual packs or sub packs could be generated.

This technique not only applies for the carbody, but also to the underframes, who had different arrangements.

Bad weather, time for drawing

Northern Indiana Railway Inc.

Very bad weather, time for drawing.

I restarts with a small vector exercice, the awesome and somewhat cabbalistic emblem of the Northern Indiana Railway.

The editable vector file (Illustrator CS3) is here