Prime Condition

This week, the room was taped, and then I cut in all the wall corners with Kilz Primer. I proceeded to roll the rest of the walls with Kilz as well. The former wacky colors can still be seen through the primer, but that is a temporary situation. I have the white paint ready, so hopefully you will see some finished walls pretty soon! Thank you to Amber for providing some good painting advice.

Now lets have some fun and talk about some future passenger trains. These will be O-Scale sets, but you can be sure that the smaller O-27 trains will still be around. The first is called "The Northern Range", and is named after the mountainous region of Yellowstone National Park north of the Blacktail Deer Plateau. I hiked through this area in May of 2008. It is home to many buffalo, some waterfalls, and beautiful vistas. The passenger train will be a relatively small, four-car consist, pulled by matching F3 A-A diesels. I purchased the passenger cars a few years ago; they were manufactured in 2005 and are rather sought after by collectors. Before K-Line Electric Trains was purchased by Lionel, they created a series of trains based on the Santa Fe "warbonnet" paint scheme, but with the silver coloring replaced with deep black. Lionel has continued to manufacture trains with this striking paint scheme, but as of yet they haven't made any O-Scale offerings (they have all been semi-scale). This paint scheme is called "Black Bonnet" or "Midnight Chief". For the yet-to-be-purchased locomotives, I can choose between the K-Line engines originally made for this set, or the more common Williams (by Bachmann) locomotive set. If I go the Williams route, I will want to inspect the paint job first to insure a good match with my passenger set. This train would also look spiffy being pulled by any of the larger O-Scale steam locomotives in the fleet. "The Northern Range" will run between Silver Falls and Iron Horse National Park on the train layout of the future, and will soon be seen on the semi-scale layout I am in the process of building.

Primed and ready for painting

The northern range of Yellowstone National Park

Three buffalo

One of the cars of "The Northern Range" passenger train