 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. And by Broadway Limited Imports, the cutting edge leader in model trains. Check out their website at Broadway-limited.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 September 2023. I'm your host, Ken Patterson. And this month, we've got a really good show in that. We look at some beautiful locomotives from Broadway Limited. We've got some F units this month, an N scale that I photographed outside, and also some T1 locomotives. Absolutely gorgeous streamlined locomotives in N scale with that Paragon 4 sound and all the bells and whistles now that seem to be normal in N scale. Also this month, we finish part three of the layout construction segment, where we're building this HO scale, HO narrow gauge scale layout that I call the Blackstone layout. It's a size layout that'll fit in any man cave. It's like eight feet by three and a half feet wide. And it's got a bit of a dog bone curve to it. It's just a beautiful layout in part three of this month's layout construction. Also the wonderful folks from Bachman Industry stop by. We've got Larry Harrington that shows us some of the new products for this month. And it's absolutely always a treat to hear what they are coming out with new before everybody else on the What's Neat show. Also be sure to check out the What's Neat this week video show podcast that we record down here in the studios every Saturday night, keeping you updated on what's new in the hobby with special guests and our wonderful regular podcast crew. It's a great show to keep everybody updated on this, the best hobby in the world. And so with that, let's continue on with the rest of this September 2023 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got to share with you some beautiful models that I am shooting this afternoon out on this gorgeous, absolutely fantastic day with cool weather. Starting out, these are all again end scale models from Broadway Limited. And I am shooting these beautiful Streamline T1 locomotives that the Pennsylvania Railroad had manufactured. They were produced around 1942 and they're absolutely exquisite. Now these are not articulated locomotives. These in fact have a rigid frame on them, which gave them excellent pulling power. And the Streamline effect on these is absolutely beautiful. Broadway Limited makes this model in five different road numbers and also in an undecorated sample you can purchase. Also, they make three fantasy paint schemes, of which I have one of them here, this beautiful silver locomotive with the red stripe. They also make it in brown, a beautiful brown, pencey paint scheme and also in green, a very dark green. They've got extraordinary detail on them, just all the piping, all the pumps. Everything is there to be had. These come with Paragon 4 sound. They've come with capacitance, capacitors built in so they don't stall on dirty track. They're absolutely just gorgeous models. They've got plastic exteriors with all the full detail on them, but the interior is solid die cast. So you've got tons of pulling power with these units. They track really well on all codes of track, code 70, code 55, end scale track. They're absolutely beautiful in that you can find these on the Broadway limited website, which is a new and improved website. They're absolutely beautiful models and I wanted to share them with you because again, they put so much work into the fidelity of these end scale models. I mean, they are absolutely beautiful. Also today, I'm shooting some F3s, F units. I've got them in Missouri Pacific and I also have them in the Frisco paint scheme. Now these models also have Paragon 4 sound, the A units are powered, the B units are dummy units. These are available in 14 different paint schemes that you can find on their website. They've got the lighting effects in them and also all of these models that I'm showing you today are available in their Stealth series so that if you choose, you can put your own decoder in them, either sound or non sound and run them on the layout. They'll run on DC, a regular DC power pack right out of the box. But again, if you put your own decoder in it of your choice, your sound system of your choice, you can again run these on your layout with full DCC and everything else that we're so used to in this hobby. It's absolutely amazing. Again, the fidelity that the manufacturers are able to make in end scale and Broadway limited has done an absolutely fantastic job on these. Paragon sound sound system matches the prototype whereas they've recorded prototype sounds of the various units so that they match the models exactly. I thought they were so exquisite. I really wanted to share them with you as I'm doing this photo shoot today, just a beautiful day with a lot of beautiful models. Check them out at the Broadway limited website and or you can purchase them at Lombard Hobbies up in Lombard, Illinois. Thank you very much the folks that help us support this show. And with that, that is the segment for what's neat. Put the dirt down. And now I'm putting down very fine creek stone for the ballast. Just like we did to the other side when we finished the other side. Put down some ballast over here in the industry, just a little bit of rock to hold the ties. Absolutely take a one inch brush very gently just testing off the ties on top. I'm spreading out the ballast and filling in the blank spots in the middle between the tracks. By laying the brush down on its side, it gives me a real smooth kind of a drag as if you're using a broom for the brushing of the ties on with the ends of the brush. Put a lot of grass and weeds in this yard with that static grass. Kind of cover up these tracks a little bit. Okay, I've applied the ballast and brushed it in. I dropped in just a little bit more woodland scenic screen here. I use a static gun afterwards when this is wet and drop in some dry dead grass. I wanna point out that I've got these covered up. The switch points are cleaned out with a brush and covered out so that I shouldn't have any glue problems messing up the switches, which truly woodland scenic cement is permanent stuff. You don't wanna get that in your switch points. So everything's ready if you get glued. Here comes the glue. Okay, so that's it. Everything's been glued. Switches are protected. No glue on them, all the track points. I can just put a little drop of water too in there to make sure that there's no glue setting up around the switch points when I pull off the tape. Everything's ready to just try now. I'm ready to put the oak sides on with this finished and finish the turntable area. The scene is still wet. I'm putting a nail in the scene because I forgot to talk about static grass. So here's our static grass gun that's on and I'm gonna put some dead grass in this yard. I'm grounded by the nail and the cord. Combs, this is coming out straight, standing up straight, look at that. And now just wonderful how that works. That's how you apply static grass. Now that I've finished the top electronics and the scenery and the track, I'm ready to start thinking about putting the wood sides on this. Now in order to attach the oak around this curvature, I'm gonna put a lot of these small boards into the foam, into the groove that we carved. I've discovered I really like this gorilla glue for this. So I'll dip the piece of wood in a bowl of water. I'm gonna spray the channel where the board's gonna go with a little bit of water to wet it. I'm gonna put this glue on the top. Very, not thick, but very thin. Even, complete coverage, but thin. And this glue's gonna expand about four times its own size without pushing out the blocks. It does not push out the blocks. And then we'll take and wipe it off the excess and just keep working all the way around the diorama the same way. Just take the small pieces of wood and drip them in the water. Make sure everything's wet so that the glue's activated by the moisture. Get the part and put it in here. And by the time I get 30 of these blocks going all around this corner, it's gonna be very strong surface for me to staple the plywood into. So I'm not just depending upon glue on the curvature that I really don't think that would hold because this plywood will be under a little bit of pressure. So that's the way we're gonna do that. To round the edges of the wood and to get off the excess polyurethane glue. Piece of wood here that's cut at the same height as where the blocks are. So as long as I put the gun right here, it's gonna get water going on. All situations wet, it expands about four times. So it's gonna fill all the gaps in here. There's a lot of extensive glue. So wherever that touches, that's gonna hold like a rock. What I'm doing now is I'm drilling out the pilot holes for the switches on the side. Okay, so after you saw me drill the holes for the switches with the drill press. What I'll do is I'll draw some lines around here. And I'll carve this and I'll make this just perfect. All the circles just right. I'll draw it first. But right now this board is cut exactly the length. It's very, very tight now, but when this piece gets sandwiched in, it's gonna just be perfect. So everything's just right. I just need to finish off the woodwork around the edges and then I'll glue this piece in next. Man, I'll finish the woodwork all the way around. And then what we'll do is we'll take a trimmer and we'll run the trimmer along the edge or the wheel on it. And that'll cut all the topography in the wood all the way around the diorama. Okay, first I'm gonna draw the lines for the top two circles where they're gonna match. That'll be a nice top and round edges. I need to go lower down here. Glass is there for that. So I'm gonna match up a circle the same size I drilled it out. I'm gonna bring it down to there when I just drill. Check my work. Good, I'm gonna draw my circle right there. I'm gonna do the same on the other side. I just wanna take that nice curved edge we have and take advantage of it and keep doing it. Got a lot to play with here too. Exactly the eraser, pull away the wood. I can see the height of the eraser's right. I'm using my pencil as my visual measuring guide. And it's working. Now I'm just gonna drop this circle straight down and I won't use the drill press to cut this. I'm gonna put this on the small table saw, jigsaw. And the scroll saw. Cut it out that way. Should just match up the bottom and it should just be perfect. And when I pull this wood off, I'm just gonna double check and make sure I've got the plexiglass for this. I'm sure I've got the real estate underneath this and black plexiglass where it'll cover that whole nice oval that we've got going. Just scrub the edges here. You know, it's this little bitty measuring, this little bitty double checking of your work that's gonna make this part look really pretty, really nice, really professional. Not that it has to, but why not, right? I'm lining this one up. My circle diameter is one and a half inches. It's the same size cutting bit that we used a little while ago to cut these circles. This one's just about drawn perfect. Looks good on this one. So that's two, finished. Okay, I've got all my lines drawn. If I drew my lines right, this should be easy, it should match up. All right, I'm just gonna sand this piece that we cut right before I put it in. I wanna just get a nice smooth edge on this one because I don't think my center will do an inside curve like this once it's installed. But if I cut everything right, this will fit just in here just right without any nails right now. We'll just curve right in there. There she goes. That's what I want to hear. There you go. That's flush and when these all get stapled in, you have your nice curvature that'll come out. Switches lined up, look at that. Ready to go. Black stain, here we come. Okay, I've moved the layout outside now and what I'm gonna do is take this laminate trimmer which it's got a ball bearing on it and then it's gonna just simply trim and cut right along the edge of the diorama so that I can get all the contours because as you can see the plywood's straight and we got a deep gorge where the bridge is, for example. So just follow this all the way around and it will work the contours and make them just beautiful on the edges. You can see why we took it outside for that process but what you end up with is a perfectly nice contour jaggedy, I'll smooth it out with some sandpaper. It's just gonna be a really nice way to finish off the edge of the wood. I really don't know any other better way to do it than to do it this way on especially on the round curves because to do this with a jigsaw ahead of time would have been an impossibility. It would have been very difficult. It's much easier to bend the wood, put it in place and then go ahead and take the trimmer and trim the edges like we've just done. One thing I wanna do is I wanna sand the diorama. So I'm gonna sand all the way around the edges and then I'm gonna come back on a Philly's holes with a little bit of wood putty. I'm gonna sand over that, final sanding and it'll be time to put some black stain on this thing. Okay, it's about six hours later and I've applied my first coat of black stain to this and it's already dried. You need a second coat of this mixture. What I do is I take two bottles of black, engine black, floccal paint and then I dump it into the ebony stain from Minwax oil based stain and it gives you a real rich black coverage but it still has always taken two coats on every diorama. As first coat, if I didn't coat it it would probably come out sort of a golden color, black and golden but I want this whole diorama to be completely black. So other than that, this is coming out very well. I'm gonna spray just a little bit of paint on top some camouflage brown from Restolium just to weather up the yard area. The gravel is just too bright. I wanna weather that up just a bit. So one coat of black and just a little weathering while this thing is outside for the next hour. Look at that rich black color right there. That's what I'm looking for. After this gets hit with three coats of high gloss it'll have that richness, that dark depth. That's what I want this to have, just a very professional finish on the outside. The small area around the switches I did with a very fine number three paint brush. Just real fine work, take your time, don't get any paint on the place glass. We'll come back and follow up the edges with dirt and finish off the final edges after the wood has been completely polyurethane. The layout will be the last part to get finished in other words, after the wood. The wood right now takes precedence against it for everything, for a little bit of dark stain or something like that on the scenery, that's okay. Look at how beautiful this is, look. This is taking this black real nice. The second coat is just magic. What I'm doing now is I'm putting on the first coat of semi-glossed minwax polyurethane. I'm gonna put on three coats of this. I'm gonna put on the first two coats and then I'm gonna sand real fine with some 2000 grit sandpaper and some water and then I'll put on the third coat which will leave this sides, just a glass finish. Not shiny, but the wood grain will show up real nice. And that's just the effect that I want. I want that dark professional effect. This is gonna be like a piece of furniture. Okay, so coat one of polyurethane is on and now I'm putting on the second coat. What I'm doing is I'm putting water on the wood now. I've got two coats of polyurethane on it and now it's time to sand this with some 1500 grit sandpaper. Now what this will do is get off any rough spots. So when you put your hand on this, on the third coat it'll be glass smooth. This is just the real important stuff. A little bit of water. Just go over the wood, work real smooth and slow. I put tape around the edges, around the whole edge of the entire layout right now. And I'm putting down dirt. I'm putting down dirt around the edges and they'll ground foam and rock just to finish off the edge, but not mar or cover up the edge of the plywood, the beautiful black wood. And so that ends part three of this layout construction segment on What's Neat and a future episode of What's Neat we will continue on with the last segment of this part four which we will then wrap up and conclude this amazing, amazing man size layout that fits in any spot, any man cave, any part of your basement. Not too big, not too small, just the right size with a lot of neat detail on it. And so with that, that ends this segment of layout construction for What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Larry Harrington from Bachman Industries in beautiful Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Larry, welcome to the show. How are you today? I'm doing great. How are you? It's been a while. I've been a couple of months since I've been on your show. So we've been kind of rotating duties at the Bachman Company here. And so everybody gets a chance to speak. We've had Doug and Tyler and Matt on the show and it's my turn again. So getting, we're really busy right now. This time of year is NMRA prep time. So everybody's like Christmas, you know, everybody's happy to see all the new products. We are getting ready to go. This will air after NMRA, but I do have one thing that I'll talk about, but for most of the part, we'll keep it a surprise until next month. Awesome. So first thing, how have you been, by the way? Everything's good here. We're keeping up with show production. We had an absolutely awesome summer this summer and a lot of activities. We had that RPM meet in St. Louis, obviously the NMRA show in Texas. There's just, the hobby is just, it's just like Lionel Strang used to say, we're all going to be covered in hobby goo because it's doing so well, it's just going to explode. Yeah, we've seen some growth over the last couple of years. One of the nice side effects of COVID was people went back to their hobby and went in their basements and expanded their layout and did all kinds of things. And I think we actually grew the hobby during that time, which it's been steady, but this is what I think was a pretty big spike for all the manufacturers out there, so. Absolutely true. Good thing. One of the first things I want to show you is that these are in stock now. Is our 0 and 30 open side, open top excursion card. It's got seats inside. That's what happens with a lot of the narrow gauge they become tourist railroads. And so they convert. We've had our covered excursion car in the past for 0 and 30, but we decided there's also a lot of open top cars out there and no top cars. And this one's Cumbries and Toltec at my fingers, otherwise you can see a little bit better. Very cool. It comes in Cumbries and Toltec, Durango and Silverton, East Broad Top and White Pass and Yukon. And I also have the White Pass and Yukon model here. Very nice. Nice color. Oh, thanks. It's got the painted inside there with the seats. So it's ready to stick your O-Gauge O-Scale figures in there and haul them around your layout. That'll be amazing and a lot of people will do just that. Yeah, exactly. So it's a nice little addition. And we also, like I said, we have those in four road names. So you can use them for a good number of existing scenic railroads out there. So like I said, we've been getting ready for NMRA. So my samples to show are kind of limited because everything's already packed up and on its way to the show. But it did snag a few things before. So this is our first test shot of N-Scale SD-40-2. Very nice. And some of your eagle-eyed people out there might notice that this one doesn't have a dynamic brake and all the road names we announced have dynamic brakes. So we are trying to make our models a little more flexible in N-Scale and all of our scales, make them with both dynamic brake and non-dynamic brake options. They sent us the test sample for the one we're not doing first. So this will be available in four road names with dynamic brakes. They'll be Santa Fe, CSX, the Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific. Nice. So it will have full DCC sound on board. It'll be Tsunami 2, I believe. No, it's economic, excuse me. I'm sorry, it's a soundtrack economic. So that'll be out sometime this year. This is something that hasn't been announced yet, but we'll be about a time this airs. True. We are going to do the very successful with the HO chemical tank car. So we're doing it in N-Scale as well. And this will also feature the two different size domes. I don't know if it shows up there on the camera. I'll get as close as I can. It does. Okay, there's the small dome and then this one is the large dome option. So got a lot of nice detail on the braking on the bottom and very easy to make couplers as well. This will be coming in four road names as well. We're doing two of the road names that we did in HO, diamond chemicals and hooker chemicals. Okay. But we'll also, I don't know if this will show up on the screen. We're also doing Penn's salt and angle guard. I don't see if they got it. Is it too much of a glare there on the screen? There it is, just right. Perfect. Okay, those are the four that we'll be doing. Okay. So you'll see that in the NMRA announcements. So it's one thing I want to remind everybody, we send out a newsletter every week to all of our subscribers on our email list. We also do things on Facebook and Instagram as well. But to get that weekly newsletter, you got to sign up for our email list. So that'll tell you what's coming, what just came in stock, anything new happening at Bachman and good place to get all your first hand information from us. Absolutely true. I've seen your Facebook page. You guys have been putting a lot of videos on there as well and photographs. Yeah, Matt Stern who was on the show earlier, he's our communications manager. He does an awesome job with videos. We just, we have one of our older end scale layouts. So we'll probably be using that for some more videos. And we have another end scale where summertime layout rehab mode right now. So we're working on the second layout as well to give him a variety of scenic backgrounds for his videos and photography as well. Absolutely true. That's great. I've still got an end scale layout down here that I started two and a half years ago. Actually it's been three years now and I need to finish that project as well. End scale, one thing that this summer brought with a lot of the manufacturers that help us support the hobby is there's been a lot of new end scale models out there. Well, we'll have some more to announce at NMRA. I just can't give, we don't have everything prepared for the, right before the, so the brochure hasn't been printed yet. So if I had more information for you at this time I would give it to you, but we'll have that available in Texas. And also be available online. I think the first day of the show, the national train show, not the first day of the convention. We always put it on the, right before the public entrance time at the show. I think that's 12 o'clock on, well it's the 11 o'clock Eastern time. So you'll have that up, just click on our catalogs and brochures, link on our website and you'll be able to view the brochure. Very cool, Larry. It sounds like a lot of neat stuff is coming out and I can't wait to see further what comes out. This is the best hobby in the world and you guys really, really add to it for everybody with all the products that you do make. Well, thanks a lot. It's a lot of fun, been in the hobby for a long time and it's always fun to bring joy to other people. Rock and roll. Is that it for today? That's it for today, yep. And so with that said, thank you very much, Larry, for being on The What's Neat Show and that ends this segment for What's Neat. All of the products seen on this episode of What's Neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois. Or order online at LombardHobby.com. And by Broadway Limited Imports, the cutting edge leader in model trains. Check out their website at Broadway-limited.com. Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com.