The Gosport American Model Railroad Group had a running meet over the weekend for members to test new equipment and get part of the club layout ready for an exhibition in a few weeks time. So in this post I wanted to share with you some of the trains from the day.

I have mostly taken video this time and I am using YouTube to play them, for anybody who is not familiar with this you simply need to click on the video and it will start playing, also once it has started a symbol of a gear wheel will appear in the bottom right of the video, by clicking on this you can increase the quality of the video, which is recommended.

To start we have nice long Union Pacific coal train running past the power station.  The train is headed by two EMD DDA40X locomotives and an EMD DD35.  At the rear of the train there is another EMD DDA40X.

The first two DDA40Xs are Bachmann models, the DD35 is a 3D printed shell on a modified Bachmann DDA40X chassis, you can read more about this here.  The tail DDA40X is a dummy locomotive, it has been built from the spare DDA40X shell left over from the DD35 build and has been mounted on a 3D printed chassis and trucks.  You can read more about the DDA40X dummy chassis here.  As the dummy DDA40X has power pickups and the original lighting board, the flashing light on top still works, and the headlight has been replaced with a red LED as you can see at the end of the video below.

Keeping with the UP theme we also had an excursion train running on the layout headed by a UP 4-6-6-4 Challenger in two-tone gray, made by Rivarossi.

This train has two extra water tenders, one pre-rebuild and one post.  These are both 3D printed and you can read more about them here.

The pre-rebuilt version, pictured above on the left, is slightly wider than the rebuilt version because a second sheet metal skin was removed in the rebuild.  In the pictures below you can just about see the difference in width.

The tool car behind the water tenders is a Con-Cor Amtrak express material handling boxcar that has been repainted.  The rest of the train is the Kato City of Los Angles set and I caught it rounding the corner past Ted’s farm.

Just before the excursion train left the station at Solent Summit a UP double header came through with  local freight.

Whilst at Solent Summit station the Canadian Pacific put in an appearance with a lumber train which had to wait for a passing mixed freight.

Over at the coal mine the Chicago & North Western trundles by with a local freight train.  Waiting in the team track is a Denver & Rio Grande Western 2-8-8-2 ready for a train.

The Burlington Railroad also runs through Solent Summit with a four car Zephyr as seen here and again over Hells Glen trestle.

Returning to the UP, and Ted’s farm, we have a set of EMD E7 with a streamlined passenger train.

The club layout is DCC powered and all the locomotives have a DCC decoder chip inside them, however these three locomotives share one decoder between them, you can find out more about this here.  They are also permanently coupled using fixed couplings which you can find here.

Whilst the E7s were in Solent Summit station the UP’s Portland Rose, it’s premier train on the Portland route, rolled into town.

The locomotive is another 4-6-6-4 Challenger in two-tone gray, this time an oil burner made by Athearn.  I think the photo below strikes a nice contrast between old and new as the steam powered heavy weight train was later replaced by the sleek yellow streamlined coaches and matching diesel power.

And to finish up we have one more little coal train powered by the BNSF running past Ted’s farm.

The rest of the day was spent getting the layout ready for the public exhibition which I will share with you in a later post.