web-site up-date ash pit tool rack

I believe you can still get the Cary boilers for the Mantua Mike from Bowser:

For all the work you'll put into it, it's a much better starting point.

The sentence "The foreground track host the ash pit and wash rack." on the home page makes no sense... can you expand on it?

____ Mark

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Doesn't that old Mantua engine have such a nice, brutish look, though? Of course it also looks really, really Northeastern. I'd really like to see somebody make an NYC H10 from it. The dome arrangement is different, and of course it has the goofy "Mantua Locomotive Works" cab, but the general idea is all right, and even the tender might pass. I really do think whoever designed that had one eye on the NYC engine. It's pretty bare-sided, but add some piping and you'd have a different hog, and one with hardly a hint of USRA about it, which is nice.

I like the USRA engines; they're generally graceful and, dare I say, pretty steam locomotives, but I really do think they are being overdone these days. One of the strongest points in favor of steam modeling is all the variety, so we might as well use it.

The Elesco heater is a good addition, although the OP might want to file off the Worthington heater right behind it. :D

Cordially yours: Gerard P. President, a legless table.

Amen to the gracefulness - for me they are the classic steam engines. Not that I don't like Alleghenys and NKP Berks and those lovely Wabash P-1 Hudson conversions, and would love a non-Belpaire Atlantic with a non-Vanderbilt coal tender or a late Wabash 2-6-0.

As for overdone, well, let's see - Uncle Pervo's Big Boys and Challengers, almost any 4-8-4, almost anything PRR . . .

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Great work, Phil! Thanks for sharing your craftsmanship with us.

Bill Bill's Railroad Empire N Scale Model Railroad:

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So it goes in model railroading, since, well, a long time ago. I have an old magazine in which Eric La Nal is pleading with readers that they refrain from building yet another K4...but that's the way it goes with the PRR. I like the PRR and their wonderful engines, but it is funny that we always see the same power revisited...completely sensible, I suppose, on the manufacturers' part, but still amusing.

"Hey, we've got the model-locomotive customers worked into a preordering frenzy, and we can make anything, so let's do... a K4! That'll stun 'em!"

One of these days somebody is going to do a K2 instead and we are all going to die of shock.

Cordially yours: Gerard P. President, a legless table.