 The What's Neat Show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies, your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping, and great service. Additional support is provided by Walthers Trains, everything you need to build a great model railroad. Check out their website at Walthers.com and by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com and thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat for May 2022. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we do have a great show. First off we start out by weathering this beautiful EM1 articulated steam locomotive from Bachman Industries in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This is a model that they had come out with a few years past and it looks absolutely amazing when it goes from brand new fresh to an absolutely weathered looking workhorse that's been working the main lines. And I take you through the entire process step by step and that's the how-to article in this month's video. We also have a great interview with Matt Stern, the communication director of Bachman Industries, and he shows us a lot of the new products that are coming out this month. That's what I like about the show. We get to see new stuff first before anybody else and it's wonderful to have that kind of stuff. I've got some great drone footage from our drone pilot Dan Scheidel. This month he shared with us a lot of BNSF consists. You'll recognize these locomotives and I love weathering ideas from above because that's the segment where if you can make your scenery look just like it does in these videos all the answers are there for everything that we want to do. And finally we have a great end scale layout. This is an interview I did at a great American train show and this is the gateway end scale layout. In fact it's called Gateway End Track and these guys have worked very hard and there's a lot of different animation from moving race tracks to barges to Jurassic parks and thunderstorms. This is a modular layout that is sure to please. And so with that I do want to say please check out the weekly show that we do every week. The What's Neat This Week and Model Rarrowing podcast. That's what I share with you. Interviews, special guests, all the latest news in the hobby every week keeping you updated on this the best hobby in the world, Model Rarrowing. And so with that let's continue on with the rest of this May 2022 What's Neat. Hi my name is Ken Patterson. Welcome to my little world. In this video I'm going to show you how I weather these beautiful EM1 locomotives from Bachman. I'm using Van Dyke to wash on the EM1 locomotives. Spread this oil out on this stone using terpenoid as the thinner for the oils this time because terpenoid doesn't eat the decals off of the locomotives. I'm just going to thin this oil paint a little bit with a brush. I won't use this brush for our main weathering because it's going to be just too heavy. So let me thin this out. I'm working on four tiles. Four marble tiles. It's easier to work with than any other flat surface. I'm using one inch brushes to do the pull downs of the oils and I'm just going to apply a wash to this locomotive. Start by wetting my brush. I'll blot it on a paper tile here. Make sure it's just the right and I rub it into oil paints. I'll start applying this wash to the locomotive quite liberally. All I'm doing is washing the oils on here. I'm getting every crevice, every pipe, every walkway of the boiler. It's really hard. You'll get a feel on how to handle a locomotive after you've done this a few times. It looks like a juggling act but in fact I've got real good control of the model side where I can place the brush's face right where I need it to fill in underneath the handrails and underneath the firebox. I think the key to oil paint weathering like this is really getting over the fact that you're going to take your brand new out-of-the-box locomotive and start covering it up like this. It doesn't make sense at first but then once you see the final finished product it looks so good that you won't be able to help yourself. This is how you'll weather everything. This grime effect I apply to every model that I do. Diesels, buildings. It's just that simple. This is going to look very nice when this dries. Now I'm going to do the tender the same way. There's the quick wipe of the heavy van dyke brown. I'm not using the paper towel to blot very much here. I would on a lighter color freight car but because this is black this is taking a lot of paint. You want to keep your strokes straight down. Rain, water, washes straight down. If you have any sideways strokes or any strokes that accidentally veer a little bit to the right or to the left it's not going to look as effective as if it was pulled straight down. So you want to keep all of your strokes straight down when you use oil paint. Now I want to explain the workspace. Here we've got the engine that we previously washed with weather oil paints and this locomotive is now going to go through the rest of the process of dust, sand finish weathering, the soot from the exhaust that we're going to apply. I've got this on a rotating lazy susan so that I can have good control of both sides of the engine but you have to stay in contact with the power of the track because when we're spraying the drivers we're going to keep this locomotive running. I've got a jar here, a little bowl full of turpentine. I'm using straight turpentine and the reason for that is because the turpentine will cut the over sprayed paint mixture that I'm going to apply which will be our dust finish from the sand dust and turpentine will cut that as I pull it down as opposed to turpenoid which I used on this engine when we originally gave the oil paint wash. Turpenoid doesn't affect oil paint so turpenoid wouldn't cut the weathering mix as I pull it down whereas the turpentine would so I think it's important to cover that. So I'm just going to go ahead and launch into this now. The first thing I'm going to do is apply the black soot grime that would come out of the exhaust stacks. We've got an airbrush, an air booth here, 500 cubic feet of air draw and I'm using an iwata airbrush here set to about 20 pounds of air pressure. Now I'm just applying a straight spray of local engine black across the top of the tender and the boiler to represent the soot. Now we're going to pull that down. I need to also spray the drivers. I want to get rid of that shiny metal driver finish. What I have here is I've connected the locomotive to my DCC on my layout that runs around the room so that I'll have power to speed this up and run it when I'm spraying the black on so that I don't get any driver shadows on the wheels. So I'll get a good even spray to spray these drivers and tone down the bright over them. And then I'm going to do the other I'm applying Bachman Easy Lube Conductive Lubricant to the top of the rail so that when the locomotive is running I will have good conductivity and the drivers will slip easily on the rail. I'm going to apply just a little bit of black on the drivers and the side rods just to get rid of that metal finish. I'm spraying with about 20 pounds of air pressure and I've got the black paint mixed about 20 percent paint and the rest thinner so it goes on as a nice black fine finish thin finish. I'm going to spray these again just to get a good coat of black. Now I'm going to take my brush I'm going to dip it in my turpentine over here. I've got a blotter attached to my arm with a rubber band so I can blot it dry and I'm going to start pulling down the black that we applied to the roof to the top of the boiler and then I'll move on down the side of the boiler. All I'm doing is pulling down that black that I sprayed right on top to give it the rain wash effect and I want to also pull down the black on the drivers just a little bit pulling down the black again on the top of the boiler evenly smooth strokes. Okay I've sprayed the drivers black in the top of the boiler black and pulled that down with the turpentine now I need to actually switch my paint so I'm going to turn on the spray booth here and switch colors to a more of a brownish gray weathering shade and I just mixed this paint a little while ago and I didn't mix it on film I didn't document mixing it but I'm going to explain to you what I did essentially I took the spray bottle and I filled it up with just a little bit of lacquer thinner about an eighth of an inch thick and then I mixed into that lacquer thinner a little mixture of concrete roof brown and earth and you're going to ask me how much of that paint did I put in there I literally took the bottle and just turned it up just a little bit like that until I got the shade of color into the lacquer thinner that gave me a good rendition of this brown then I mixed in a little bit of the earth and a little bit of the concrete until I came up with what was close to a brownish grayish weathering medium it doesn't have to be exact close enough to match prototype pictures in this case I'm using a morning sun book to kind of give me just a little guidance on how the em1 locomotives weather so now that I've got this paint switched I'm going to run the locomotive I get the drivers to spin so that I don't get any driver shadows on the wheels as I start applying this light dusting and I'm going to take it from the second driver and I'm going to go back bring it all the way down the tender you want to make sure the drivers are spinning when you're applying the paint to this area of the locomotive because you do not want the driver blocking being blocked by the side rod because that'll create a shadow which will not look good I'm going to do this to the other side of the locomotive same way third the second driver back trailing truck and right up the tender with your sand dust mixture second driver back is where it accumulates on the wheels now I'm going to take my my brush just dip it in a turpentine blot it and I'm going to start pulling down the dry dust that we just applied to this model that includes the tender trailing truck and I want to do the side rods without touching the drivers I need to get these side rods to spin so I can get to them so I'm going to hook up my DCC power here get the locomotive to move just a little bit to those drivers and I want to pull down the dust on the drivers to give the rain effect of straight down wash same on the wheels and then I'll do the other side of the locomotive the same way I'm going to dip in my turpentine again just to get a clean of brush blot it on my blotter here and pull down even stroke straight down the same way turn off that spray booth so we can hear the same on the drivers I want to pull down the white dusty sandy mixture I just want to pull down the drivers on this side now what I want to do is apply one more coat of dust to the locomotive and I don't want to pull this one down I don't want this to be rainwashed dust I want this to be fresh just apply dust in between storms so I'm going to turn on the spray booth here and start the engine running and spraying the drivers I'm using an Iowata airbrush here and what I like about these airbrushes is the patch eight three ounce jars fit I swear by these jars they work so well this dust is coming from the second driver back again a little bit on the tender third the second driver back and I'll turn it around and do the other side and I'm going to second driver back little dust on the tender now I'm ready to do the valve grease I'm going to take my every black paint straight out of the tube I'm going to blot just a little bit here on the side of the model so I get the right consistency of mixture here this is where I'll work this is my palette now and I want to apply this I'm blotting this a little bit too heavy on the brush I want to apply this dark oiled effect grease right in here this gives a very effective dirty oily lubricated effect because there's not a lot of sand or dust in this this is fresh oil so you want this area to be dark and after that dries that pretty much concludes the weathering of this locomotive for this segment of What's Neat I've got Matt Stern the communication director of Bachman Industries in Philadelphia Pennsylvania with us today and he's going to update us on the new and wonderful products coming from Bachman Industries it's always great to get an update from a major manufacturer like yourself Matt now the folks watch the video and just saw me weather that beautiful HO scale EM1 locomotive that Bachman had come out with a few years past and I just want to stress that those models are in fact available currently in the catalog in end scale yes our end scale EM1 is uh it's one of actually my personal favorite locomotives it's it's just a fantastically detailed model um it's uh and it's such a unique locomotive too it's something that I think we'll find a home on on any end scale layout it even if it's not a Baltimore Ohio layout it's a talking point locomotive it absolutely is you can find them out on ebay they're going for very high prices right now but the fact is someday in the future as we've always seen Bachman may reintroduce that product to the market you never know you never know so Matt you've got some exciting stuff to talk about today tell us yeah so uh we have quite a few new uh freight cars coming out this year if you've seen our 2022 catalog we have a good amount of HO scale stuff and we also have some large scale cars um got that catalog right here check it out unfortunately the the large scale cars are are actually out at a train show at this time so I don't have them on hand okay um but I do have um we also have a large scale dash nine which I know a lot of people are very excited about um and again unfortunately the the samples we have right now are at the train show but I do have a cab sample here this is a very uh rudimentary sample here but it will kind of give you an idea of some of the detail like we've got the separately applied windshield wipers um the railings and rungs and this is actually the the goal wing cab version so the Santa Fe and bnsf versions will actually have the goal wing cab as per the prototype whereas the uh the standard cab that doesn't have these divots will be on the the other versions that's absolutely fantastic and they created those divots so that that engine would fit as they run them through the whole system the rotary dumpers as I recall a long time ago yeah I believe that I believe that's so that's fantastic I did shoot a Bachman cover using a pre-production sample of that model variations of the model are going to be different than what you see but let me show you this beautiful photograph that we shot this was a desert scene and it came out really neat it was just a great shot on a diorama so check it out so Matt what else you got to talk about so we have a good amount of new HO scale stuff to show you um this is all stuff that's currently um it we've just received development samples of them so it's nothing that's hit the market yet but we expect to see these hopefully by the end of the year if not sooner fantastic um so the first things I can show you here are we've got our new line of ps2 hoppers these are a little different to the previous run that we had um these are the late versions so the early versions and the late versions so I don't think I have an early version sitting around here unfortunately but the uh the difference in design is they just have this single post here whereas the early versions had a a thinner double post at the end of the car so it's a very small difference but it it keeps it correct for these later versions that's fantastic and those come with metal wheel sets and those beautiful couplers that look scale don't they they do yeah they come with our metal wheel sets black and metal wheels um we also have if you look underneath here we've got some separately applied details such as we've got the brake lines um they're going to stay black I believe they were painted with the color of the car the old versions but in reality they usually are a separate color to the rest of the car so we've kept them black for these and uh you can kind of see here we've got you can see the uh see-through walkway up here on the top so we actually have uh trying to get it in the light here that's very cool kind of see it at the end of the car there yes so yeah so it's all it's all see-through there um just as we'll be on the prototype this is the MKT version um this is an MOW car I believe and then the other sample I have here is the the CSX version and we have a southern pacific one here as well very nice oh look at that and we do actually have a bnsf version as well but this is also out of the show right now okay so that is our ps2 hopper um that's a nice kind of modern era freight car that we've got to look forward to um we also have some little earlier era cars here these samples actually just came in yesterday so this will be the the first unveiling of them these are our 50 foot um reefer cars oh that's beautiful we saw a pre-production sample of one of those in the previous what's neat video I think Larry Harrington showed that off but now you've got a decorated sample there yes these are our first decorated samples um we have a we have one here for canadian pacific and we have another one here for railway express agency which I think is just a fantastical heat scheme it is absolutely oh my gosh I can't wait to weather one of those haha sure look fantastic um and one of the things that's cool about these cars is they're actually based off of a new york central prototype um they're very similar to cars that could be seen across the country um but I don't believe a model of this particular design of car has been done um in a very long time if if if ever in the past in ho scale um and just to go over a couple of the details on this car um so again we have we have separate walkways up here on the top um we have a uh really nicely detailed and and here you can kind of see there's a kind of ornate looking brake wheel here that's beautiful we got the we've got the ladders up here and um we've got the rungs down here the grad buyers very nice and these actually ran so they're in our freight car section in the catalog but it's worth mentioning that these actually ran um in passenger trains so they would usually typically be at the head end of the train um they would be behind the locomotive in front of the passenger cars and the reason they would do that is because they would be trying to get the stuff to market as quickly as possible on the passenger trains always have priority absolutely right that's amazing it's great that you have this knowledge it's great that you can when you're at a train show and you're discussing this with the customer it adds that much more value to the presentation absolutely yeah and then we do have a few more other items here as well um so you might remember um we had a train set that came out in 2019 which I have here which is our transcontinental train set this was uh hugely popular it was brought out to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the the driving of the golden spike absolutely um one of the things with this set though is that if you notice in the set here we had both locomotives and we had one passenger car pro locomotive which doesn't really make a train so beautiful beautiful photograph on that box by the way oh yeah how much fun is that um so we actually have brought out the uh in the set here by uh bring it back up one more time um you've got the univacific baggage car and then you've got the central pacific um or it's a combine car sorry and then you've got the central pacific coach car um so what we've done is as separate all items in our catalog this year we're bringing out the univacific coach car and the central pacific combine car so you can actually make a train that's more than one car for both locomotives absolutely plus that train set would make a great display set on anybody's mantle or desk oh absolutely that's fantastic great concept and marketing on that um and then just a couple more items here we have the uh we have a new 40 foot reefer here the wood side reefer this one is tipo table lines i believe we're gonna do a little bit of paint adjustment to this so this is not the final paint scheme but it's uh all the graphics and everything are is how they'll be on the final car that's beautiful yeah we think it's a really cool paint scheme um it's uh it's just an interesting car it certainly is and last but not least we also have two new of uh two new 50 foot reefers um these are see here we go we've got the burlington root and we've got the conrail and uh these are going to be joining our 50 foot line which we've had around for a while but um i don't think we've had any paint schemes quite like these before in it so we're pretty excited about that this is amazing you all are pushing the envelope for creating prototype looking models now will we see you at the NMRA national here in st louis coming up very shortly so unfortunately i will not be there personally but we will be there as a as a company absolutely fantastic everybody's going to be able to see all these beautiful new models at the show touch them feel them and check them out plus meet the wonderful people that are bachman that's awesome isn't it so is there anything else that we covered everything for this month matt so i think we pretty much covered it um we're always getting new products in new samples so uh who knows what we'll have next month that's absolutely fantastic well thank you so much for showing the viewers of the what's neat show what's new and exciting out there in philadelphia no doubt there's a lot of exciting products that they are going to love and so with that matt thank you very much and that is this segment for maize what's neat all right thanks a lot segment of what's neat i'm standing here with jeremy jansen and i'm also standing here with dale blust and you guys represent the gateway and track layout that is better than uh 21 years old you were explaining to me yep that's right tell me dale about your passion for this hobby guys i've enjoyed training since i was a teenager and we just thought it'd be fun to pick a scale and start building some modules nice and we're both co-finders of uh yeah gateway i i had gateway clubs started and they had st charles and scale and we merged together in 2000 nice okay i understand that because i remember that layout as well now jeremy tell me what is the minimum radius on this lap uh minimum radius is uh 21 inches okay and the height is about it's perfect for viewing what's the height 40 inches 40 inches now you guys have got a lot of different scenes modeled on this with a lot of animation let's start talking about the raceway how amazing is that pretty neat it took me several years to actually get it working the way i wanted it yes and it's one of the big attractions when the kids come around and the delts right do you have a magnet system what what makes the cars go there's two belts underneath the layout and they've got 22 magnets silicone to the belt and then each of the cars have a little bitty magnet on there follows the big magnet it is so interesting and amazing to watch you've also got Jurassic Park with some dinosaurs that was actually my grandson's idea okay he was about 15 when he came up with the idea he wanted to do Jurassic Park and i said well i'll help you with it but you lay it out so he took a piece of paper drew up what he thought should be and we followed that exactly to the team very cool jeremy tell me i saw you parking your train in this beautiful long switch yard a few minutes ago what do you model what's your railroad uh i primarily model a Santa Fe railroad so you like the long run long trains uh sometimes most of that like runs switching but this one's more suited for long trains very cool another neat thing jail that i noticed on this layout was you've got like this fork this this wild west theme scene tell us about that well i belonged to a guy that left the club a year ago but joe had a lot to do with it um another scene that i noticed you've got on this is a river scene with a fairy faring back and forth in a dry dock tell us about that wonderful scene that was also made by joe okay i came up with the animation after he asked me if i could move his ferry back and forth and i said yeah we can do it no problem so that's very cool i noticed on the other side the far sided layout you've got europe modeled you've got a storm like cloud scene i mean this layout every single module has its own theme and is so interesting i agree with you everybody has different ideas when they're making a module we're trying to always make something different something new all the time that's awesome listen guys i want to thank you so much for sharing this layout with the viewers of what's neat this is the best hobby in the world and it's because of folks just like you thank you very much all the products seen on this episode of what's neat are available from lombard hobbies in lombard illinois or order online at lombard hobby dot com walthers trains supporting hobby retailers across the world since 1932 check out their website and learn more at walthers dot com bachman trains now that's the way to run a railroad check out their website at bachman trains dot com