 For this What's Neat this week, it's February 2015 and man we got a good show for this month. Michael Buddy comes by with some of his latest auto rack creations using the Johns 3D vehicles that we've been getting from Germany. Also in the show, we cover the new P42 locomotive from Cato. This model's got the motors in the trucks, small coreless motors that actually perform very well even though they're only about a quarter of an inch in diameter. Also for this show, we cover the prototype modelers meet this past August in St. Louis. This show was an absolute packed show, great models, hundreds and hundreds of models. I've got a good interview with David Leibach from Tangent Scale Models and he goes into just a little bit of the philosophy of his company and how he arrives at the conclusion and the decision to design and come out with a product for the market. Also at the show, I ran into a couple of graffiti artists. The man's name is, I don't think I'm going to give his full name because it's still regarded as a criminal activity even though I've got to tell you I really don't think it is criminal. It's more of an artistry. He gave me a photograph of his girlfriend and the great effort that they go through to do their art. I didn't know it. He showed me a magazine. There's a whole industry created around the graffiti, around the tagging hobby if that's what you want to call it. These guys are professional artists and I mean they've got spray cans, they've got tip nozzles. There's trade shows on the subject for Heaven's Sakes. I had no idea that it was such a big fad. In fact I sent them home with a couple of large scale freight cars and asked them to paint their tags on them for me and they did a really beautiful job that I think is going to add a lot of color to the Garden Railroad. After the prototype modelers meet, Gary Christensen comes by and shows off some of his latest models that he's done in the last year. A couple of beautiful Santa Fe, BNSF locomotives and some freight cars and he explains in simple language and terms how it is that he arrived at the effects on the models. So enjoy this February 2015 What's Neat This Week. These are incredible looking auto racks with the loads, Mike. These are John's 3D from Germany and in the October What's Neat This Week we introduced these to all our viewers and I saw them for the first time and now these are some finished auto racks that you've completed with. Tell us what year these are and what it is that you've done, Mike. 76 Lincoln Mark IVs, I took one of the John 3D models, hollowed it out and made a resin mold and molded a bunch of these in resin and I painted them with different colors. Did the windows with Scotch tape. I also cast an interior from a custom metalwork 78 and pallet and I used that from inside of these cars and let's see I made the tires also from the 78 and pallet and I resin cast a bunch of those and painted them with the bare metal foil on them. That's it. Dude they're really awesome we really appreciate checking these out and thanks for the follow-up. Alright. You can really respond to that. This must be what Christmas looks like. Man it was beautiful. So when you have all these boxes of all these beautiful cars from Germany, oh my gosh look at this. Look at all these beautiful models. That's what Christmas looks like. Look at all those boxes. These are these cars from Germany that we featured on the show a few months back and now Mike and Dirk are going to do some pretty nice looking street scenes just judging from the happy smiles here. That's my favorite right there. Yeah. Cut it. Extend this for 8 feet. Those are printed. Look at these beautiful little end scale buildings for Bachman. Job I've just finished this past week, movie theater in end scale and impressive looking structure for sure. Look at that. This is the 4x4 pickup. Oh I didn't know you were having one. I didn't know you were having one. So what are you going to do with the cab? Working on an end scale Bachman shoot this afternoon. It's a really beautiful day for a shoot and these are the new end scale resin cast buildings that I'm trying to take a few shots of right now. A shot set up to do this one right here. Too much mold. A couple end scale cars and I'm in business. For this segment of What's Neat this week I wanted to kind of discuss and look at the new Kato Amtrak locomotive that they've come out with. What's unique about this locomotive, the curiosity that killed the cat for me, was the fact that no longer is the motor in the main housing of the locomotive, but it's down in the trucks. So there's a motor in the rear truck and a motor in the front truck and I had to see how that would perform. Curiosity, like I said, killed the cat with me on this one. I couldn't wait to find out how well this design worked. Now it's nothing new on this dash nine, this Aristograph large scale dash nine. There's actually four trucks in this model, or four motors in this model. There's two models, or two motors in each pair of trucks on that. So there's four 12 volt motors on this and when you've got three of these running for the cars outside, I'm pulling probably close to seven amps of electricity. So I use pretty big fuses outside for that. But with the Kato design, it's much smaller. I took the locomotive apart. I got really close to the motor and look at this design. This motor isn't any more than a quarter of an inch in diameter. It's a, it's a Coralus motor. The new technology these days is Coralus motors. I know Bachman is using them in a lot of their locomotives. They run super smooth. They don't have to be very big and they've got a lot of torque. I put this locomotive through its paces and it really performed well. I ran it for about three hours. Both motors and the trucks never got hot and this thing weighs a lot. It weighs many ounces. So it was able to pull easily the Amtrak hot system, Walker's cars that I put behind it. So it's worth taking a look at. This Kato locomotive ran through its paces here, three hours of running. The motors didn't get hot. I think we've got a viable design now that other manufacturers may start looking at and coming out with similar types of designs. For this segment of What's Neat This Week, I've got Lionel Strang in my studio this afternoon. And Lionel, introduce yourself. Say hello to the What's Neat This Week folks that watch the show. This is so cool being on What's Neat This Week right here in your, I'm right here in your basement and I'm talking to everybody. Isn't that amazing? Hey everybody out there, how are you doing? I watched What's Neat This Week, I've watched every episode and now I'm actually on it. This is so cool. Well Lionel, you've got a pretty neat podcast. I listened to your interview last week with NEC and it was very informative. How is it doing? How's it going for you doing your podcast every month and tell us about your show? Well, the podcast is called Modelers Life. It's on iTunes, you can find it on iTunes and there's a Facebook page called Modelers Life podcast and I started it on August 1st and basically the theory was I felt that there was more to people than just their model railroading and I wanted to find out about their life as well. So we interviewed two people a month, around the first of the month and around the middle of the month and we have other things, we have viewer mail and other stuff like that but it's great. I mean we've talked to people like Marty McGurk, we've talked to Jim Scores from NCE, he was really interesting and I actually have interviewed Joe Fugate and that will be coming up middle of December and tonight before we did this we were interviewing Ken Patterson which I've been, I've been wanting to talk to Ken Patterson for years. Ken's name, he's well known and I've been wanting to talk to him forever and he's a fascinating guy so I'm looking forward to the, when that podcast comes out. I think we've had in the five months, by the end of the year we've had about 15,000 downloads. That's amazing, 15,000, you can start charging ad space with numbers like that. I hadn't even thought of that but that would be a good idea I guess wouldn't it? Yeah that's, well we'll see about that, I mean I'm still learning and sometimes the sound quality isn't great but yeah I'm really enjoying it, I mean model railroading has added so much to my life and now I'm getting to do this podcast and that's great. Now I know we see Lionel a lot on Railmasters TV. Train, trainmaster. I messed up Joe, I'm sorry. Trainmasters TV, working with Barry and we've seen you working with Miles Hale and a lot of different enjoyable projects that you guys work on. Tell us a little bit about that experience. The trainmasters is really cool, it's run by Barry Silverthorn. Joe Fugate had told me that he was looking to do some video and around the same time he got an email from Barry Silverthorn who was an experienced videographer and he wanted to do these videos but he had no way of distributing them. So the two of them got together and then Barry contacted me, he'd seen me on a few YouTube videos and said you'd be great at hosting these and I went no I wouldn't. He said yeah you'd be good and I said no I wouldn't. And finally he talked me into doing one of them and it's a lot of fun and I'm very you know I don't know if I'm particularly good at it but I certainly have the ability to speak up so that's a key quality I guess when you're hosting those videos and I've met lots of neat people. Miles Hale we did a lot with him and John Lawrence and yeah they're great and they're on Model Railroad Obvious and it's a subscription there's previews to see and there's a monthly or yearly subscription and it's a great great product. That's awesome now tell us again how do we find your podcast where what do we enter into our computer if you go to it's called Modelers Life so there's a Facebook page about it Modelers Life podcast and if you go to iTunes and just type in Modelers Life or if you type in my name Lionel Strang then it'll take you right to where the podcast is and then you can just download it from there. Well we all love you man we enjoy what you do we really like seeing you on the TV show with Joe Fugate and all the guys so just keep doing up the great work for us. All right well this is pretty cool though right here it's really cool. All right guys Lionel Strang he's the best. For this segment of What's Neat This Week I've got David Leobach from Tangent Models here at the St. Louis Prototype Modelers Weeks. Now you've seen a lot of David's models because Jeff Meyer shoots a lot and weathers a lot of his models for segments of the show but it's really nice to have a manufacturer here in St. Louis to talk to. So Dave tell us what is it that you've got that's new this year? Well first of all thanks a lot for letting me come and be on your show today. We've got a brand new covered hopper today it's called the General American Dry Flow Covered Hopper it was produced by General American Transportation Corporation in 1959 it was production for about four years it was bought by 16 railroads and many private operators and this is the first release of the car is available now so that's the first thing we've got today that's new. Tell me what else do you have well we also have our tank car which is right here from the steam era the car was produced first in 1929 it looks like it's almost an end-scale model it's really cool it's very well weighted and it runs extremely well but those lasted all the way up until the 80s believe it or not and revenue service and they're very weathered in the 80s they're kind of a cool opportunity for some neat modeling. So besides the General American Covered Hopper that we have and the General American Tank Car from the 20s we also have the Pullman Standard 4750 Covered Hopper available now in about 16 new paint schemes that we've released over the past three months. Right here at the show which is important for your show is we have released the 4750 in Union Pacific in Rock Island in CNW Banditized Rock Island and the NHX Creston Iowa pink car so there's four new paint schemes that were released right here at the prototype modelers meeting St. Louis. David you come out with such magnificent looking models they're so obscure they're like niche models how do you arrive at the decision to come out with something like this. Well to me it's a number of factors I think the first one is I spend a lot of time studying great cars. I've looked at books from everywhere you can think of like Penn Central or Erie, Lackawanna or Burlington Northern back and forwards through time so I go back to the steam era I look at steam era consists trains like Missouri Pacific steam there's many books by companies like Morning Sun that have lots of those action shots so I look at kind of what's the broader car audience or cars that are on the railroads and then I try to see like which cars haven't been done by other manufacturers because I don't feel like doing cars that are done by other manufacturers is a very good business strategy I try to focus on cars that are unique and different and can be executed well by my company and one of the things I look at besides era is kind of the different colors and paint schemes that I can put on the cars so that that can sell product so that's kind of where I head when I think about new product development. That's really inspiring. The fact is there's more room out in the water for any young guy who wants to do this but there's a learning curve it looks like Dave's got it pretty figured out. Dave I really appreciate you being in St. Louis and showing us the awesome models that you've made and you said you've made nine models now in the past seven years so I'd almost call you still sort of a newbie on the block but you really know what it isn't here doing and we appreciate what it is you've done for us so thank you. Oh you're welcome I I really enjoy to build prototype models myself I haven't built a lot of models recently because I spent a lot of time building this company but I hope to get back to that but really the truth here is that Tanger scale models company that's oriented towards the prototype modeler we're run by prototype modelers and we produce models that look awesome especially when you want to spend 50 hours of your own time decaling and weathering up or feeding up a model you might as well start with the best possible model that looks like the real thing before you weather it so afterwards it looks even better. Wow that is so well said one more time if you're gonna spend a hundred hours working on something why not work on something where you're starting with the best and that's kind of the point the smaller companies like what Dave has got here those are the guys that really focus on the prototype stuff that we really care about it's something that's expensive to do we appreciate the fact that they do it. Yep and we swim with sharks but we do it every day and we enjoy it so thanks for the opportunity again to be here Ken. Thanks a lot Dave. Thank you. DD 40 shot with the locomotive was moving well today we're upping the game by simply adding a big boy getting the drivers to spin we've got a crowd and we've recreated the excursion of number 4014 running the big boy rehab been running in all of its glory so today I'm working on that shot just to see how it's going to come out so let's let's see how this one turns out it's essentially the same shot that we did do with the DD 40 except for I've added a great deal of rail fans some automobiles that will blur out the shot but of course I've got the wheels and the big boy locomotive doing their thing and spinning so that on film at a creepy effect of the big boy rushing along on the excursion after this thing's been completely rehabbed and ready to go so we've recreated an event in time that hasn't happened yet but what a tribute to the big boy 4014 that's going to be running soon everything slides just like we did on the last shot so the theory is that when this thing's down and it's moving it's going to look like this puppy running check it out just like that it looks like she's moving did you catch that that last video clip was pretty amazing watching that locomotive moonwalk sliding that diorama on video in fact creates a whole new opportunity on how to videotape locomotives where they could be stationary and simply the scenery is going to move they really actually created a cool effect that I didn't realize until watching the same video that we just saw now why didn't I ruin the locomotive I used lots of Bachman easy lube on the wheels of the locomotive so that it would spin freely this is conductive lubricant and I use this on all the models and it's especially on the big boy wheels while she was sliding I had a couple nails out front holding it in place so now let me show you the way the photograph came out this is a photograph before any photoshopping was done to it you can see the blur effect that pretty much captured what we were after and then Chris Palomera's at athern added some smoke and this is the amazing results the smoke the spinning wheels tweak the blur effect on the automobiles in the foreground and boy I think I'll tell you what we've recreated the excursion of the big boy locomotive running in almost glory so thank you for watching this February's photographic tip Jeff, Gary, what are you guys doing here? What are you guys doing on here? This is a post rpm 2014 model she was one of some of my models we haven't seen Jeff's a man behind the lens some cars I haven't you know I haven't brought out before I'll tell you what this tank car looks pretty hot it's pretty crazy you know yeah gear how did how did you achieve that effect on this tank car you want to talk about how many tank cars lost their lives before I came to that effect it's pretty neat looking man it looks like it's sun faded on top well basically it's what I was trying to go after was a primer like a primer that had worn the paint worn down to the primer let's put it that way see a lot of that stuff because I guess the elements or whatever the contents of the car it's a four layer wash of ivory white acrylic it's pretty thin down and once it's done I see a little dull coat came back in along the edges to kind of get rid of the hard line of the white paint and brushed in basically kind of hard brushed in with a soft sable brush some black pastels to soften the edges you can see like some of the some of the brush strokes are left in there on purpose for the fact that that's what you're going to see on the cars like the paint almost peeled off in sheets so let's still get this off the edge I had some pastels and then sealed it all and came back in later to add to the rust that would come in on the top of the primer so man that looks spectacular it was the first time I ever did something like that so yeah I was kind of happy with the results when it was finished that's really nice man thank you very much for sharing it with us today thank you