Side Shot Saturday-starting 2 March

Hope you're back home and fully recovered, harborbelt.

I figured this was the next leg in building the power car (confirmed by a cheat looking at the attachment). The photoetch looks sharp; is it unusable for being the wrong size(s)?

Euro passenger car models can be epic, especially those geared toward the scale crowd and not the toy train fans (although there are many very nice toy passenger cars as well). Nothing better than a diner with all of the interior bits.

This MPC 8310 from 1982 or 1983 has passed over the workbench repeatedly over the last few weeks. I'll admit it's both interesting and awful simultaneously, a sort of 1615 reissue, but with an extended plastic pilot "designed" to accommodate a flimsy pilot truck:



Produced for a Sears set in the early 1980s, it runs, but poorly (I seem to be caught up in e-unit hell right now). I tore the place apart yesterday looking for the cheesy MPC-era slope-back tender; I knew I had one, finding it in a stash I'd forgotten about. I ordered a replacement marker lamp from Dr. Tinker; I've never tried replacing one of those...I presume that can be filed down, then the replacement epoxied into position (?) 

I'm wondering if the shorter pilot from a 1615 will easily fit this. If so, it could be made into something a bit more visually pleasing. A lot to think about. In any event, it returned to the side of the workbench where it will continue to haunt me.  

Check out brass photoetch intended for ship models. There's a lot of it out there, although finding any approaching 1:48 scale might be tough. I have found some in the past for small louvers, screening, etc., in 1:200 scale that worked for various applications.

If the stuff you have is made of cardstock, experiment with it a bit. I have found that cardstock may initially warp when first painted, but as it dries it will shrink back into shape. This is especially true with the vellum paper I use in paper models...it crinkles up pretty bad when I first cement them into the model, but then they shrink back into something as tight as a drumhead. Might be worth a quick experiment.

Glad to hear you're on the mend. My daughter is a middle-school teacher...seems like every time she stops by, I get sick with some sort of crud.  

That is one bad@ss looking locomotive, af. Looks one step away from an armored train.

Looks like something that might have seen action in South Africa during the Boer War.

  I didn't realize Marklin had made an updated model of the Boer War train.  Here's a link which illustrates and describes the original offering they made back at the turn of the last century.


marklinstop.com/2020/12/marklin-war-toys-the-boer-war-panzerzug-part-2/

Back in 1981 I saw this in the new Lionel SD18 in the catalog because it was kinda scale and a great paint scheme. Back then almost every engine was based on another engine. The SD18 was on the gp9 frame so the shell was made to fit the frame. 
Didn't have the money in 1981  so I never bought it. Well a month or so ago I saw it on TrainZ with the power and dummy in new condition. I decided to live the dream all over again. Dont get me wrong as nice as these units are they are not very good runners. With one motor in the powered unit it just didn't run very well. But if you were ever into MPC at the time you learned that by putting the power unit behind your dummy it ran and pulled ok. Btw this also went for the U36, GP7'S and 9's, U33's and maybe some others. 
So you see 43 years later I got one of my favorites.

Dave

Tap on picture for larger picture

You are right, of course, about the Fulgurex connection but for reasons unknown it wasn't a lasting relationship - see first article linked below. I got interested enough in these models to dig around a bit and this included finding the reprint of a 1990s catalog pictured below. It explains in four languages the history of Elettren as a family company founded just after WWII:





The white car I have pictured above is at middle left; the #4080 salon car I have recently seen is at bottom right although the page has faded and it looks nothing like as impressive as in person.

As far as I have been able to establish Elettren is still going as a family company making a very limited number of cars each year. I have found out absolutely nothing about current prices except in the secondary market, particularly at train auctions where some of these cars have come up. In that market they cost around the same as one of Scott Mann's GGD special run single cars, which are made of brass and are near the same quality as Elletren. So that means roughly twice the price of today's Lionel scale passenger cars but the difference in quality is so wide that it makes Lionel's current offerings seem like highway robbery. 

A few years ago an Anglo-Dutch collector published a detailed history of Elettren up to 2021 if anyone is interested in knowing more and in particular about their Pullman models: 

sncf231e.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Elettren.pdf

Interestingly the TCA Western Division also published a shorter chronology: www.tcawestern.org/elettren.htm