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The Montana Rail Link Railroad (MRL) is soon to become another fallen flag railroad. Their 35 year lease from the BNSF is soon to expire and they decided not to renew. I always admired them for the scenery that they travel thru and the nice blue locomotives, rolling stock & they even use a caboose every now and then. Last August I acquired a like new in the box Aristo-Craft SD45 painted in MRL livery for a decent price. I have a pair of old beater SD45's in the grey, yellow and red Seaboard System paint scheme. When I mean fairly complete models with some detail parts missing and no drive blocks. So I stripped the paint off of one and painted into MRL blue and black to match the Aristo version. Number 356 is the Aristo factory painted version and 351 is the one I painted using Tru-Color Wabash Blue as their MRL blue was a bit lighter than what Aristo used and I wanted these units to closely match in hue. and lettered myself. The diagonal stripes on sides are painted on. The white horizontal safety stripes are just plain white laser decal paper. The 351, Montana and Rail Link are decals I made. Builders plate was Aristo's as it's just a decal that can be carefully removed and re-applied. Dupli-Color Matte Clear is what I use for final coat. Nose Chevron stripes are painted and the red circle and number boards are my decals. I haven't installed the air hoses yet as I'm waiting for some snowplows and ditch light housings as hoping Bachamann makes those parts and sells them when the Dash-9's appear. Rear of units and once again Montana, Rail Link red circle and number boards are decals I printed here at home. I installed a RailPro decoder along with changing all lights over to Led's. I like nice & clean installs as have all necessary plugs, receptacles, contacts, different colored wiring in various sizes and contact crimpers. If I don't have it I'll order it in from either DigiKey or Mouser. 3.5" diameter speaker in fuel tank and this thing is loud with 14 watts feeding it sound. I much prefer using round speakers over the cheap oval ones that Aristo uses. I mean how many oval speakers do you see in home stereo cabinets or pro-audio??...none. I recently bought a Aristo GP40 that's a real beater and I'm currently working on, that is waiting to be stripped and painted into MRL blue and black. Oh and MRL had 1 GP40...Number 500 The real one. Caboose...another future project! I'll use a USA Trains wide vision model. Work train in a beautiful setting! Here's the MRL corporate website if interested.... MRL

Yesterday at our local train show, which btw is the largest monthly train show in the world (not like some poser train show north of NYC) I found me this for a really great price It's a Aristo-Craft Milwaukee Road (of course) Doodlebug in absolutely like new condition...even the box is excellent! Made in the year 2000...Yep...Aristo-Craft really knew how to make trains and I'll make it even better by installing the excellent MTH Proto-Sounds 3 with smoke...emitting from 6 stacks Oh and here's the link to our local train show http://greatmidwesttrainshow.com/about-the-show/

Sure looks like Bachmann is planning to make the Aristo-Craft 53' Evans boxcars for 2022! This is a page from the "New" NMRA 2021 catalog..https://resources.bachmanntrains.com/nmra-2021/html5/index.html

Need to buy a used diesel locomotive either battery/rc or pnp for our open house the end of the month. Don't have time to repair mine. Has to be able to handle four foot radius. edmann@ptd.net