July 12th, 2009

Made some progress on the Moritz model series. The first set of White WH-4 semi-tractors went into the Elvas Tower library.

Tim Muir has taken some screen shots of the new trucks that really make 'em look good...My two favorites are this color shot with the White billboard and a black and white shot of the whole set in a parking lot. Tim's got an eye for composing a scene. He always manages to make my stuff look better than I expected.

The trucks came out great. Niko's artwork made all the difference.  I haven't felt this great about the results since the DL109 series was finished. Input from Tim and others helped me fine tune the models and the results owe a lot to them. All I did was move some points around on a computer screen.

I played around with some color schemes for the WH-4. It was a learning exercise on what could be done with the bells and whistles in Paint Shop Pro. They came out alright, but it took a little cutting and pasting to get them to look like they do in these shots...

I'm pretty sure I'll need to ask Niko's permission before I release these beauties. I'll nave to check.

I've also been corresponding with Lukas Lussen. He is working on a new modified version of  Jerry Sullivan's Milwaukee Road Electrified Division through the Rockies. I've been looking at a Beta version and I'm lovin' it.  Running out of Butte Montana on the Northern Pacific with the Milwaukee and the little Anaconda all running parallel makes for some interesting railroading. The North Coat LImited is one of my favorite paint schemes.

Lukas had also written to me about his work on the Beta quills I had sent him (eons ago) He has painted them for several different variants but was unable to duplicate the single ended units. The quills were all rebuilt from double ended units to single in one of their MANY shoppings (probably all for frame cracks). I feel kinda bad that Lukas had to work on those repaints. Just before the project stalled I had done the same thing. There are about ten variations of the model all with different paint schemes and arrangement of details. I had tried to do at least one of every variation I knew of. I could have just zipped them up and e-mailed them.

So for Lukas, here are some screenshots of the "herd" as they now stand...Left to right from 1915 to 1957.

From the 1957 end of the queue...

Some rear views...

and front views...

The revamped drive unit...

and the reason the project stalled...

Anyway, the outcome of all this (beside my very own beta copy of RMD East) is the resurrection of the quill project. I've been going over the screenshots and will be checking the models themselves soon. The eng files Lukas has created for the RMD East will be used on the next version. If I remember correctly the units were almost ready for beta release (at least).

That's about all for now, thanks for listening.