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I wasn't in a hurry to get home one day last week, so I took a bit of a more scenic drive with my ultimate goal of stopping in at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden Colorado, basically right across the highway from the Coors Brewery (which is truly massive by the way, a valley full of concrete structures and heavily served by, I think, the BNSF). Well the weather didn't cooperate with me at all but I did stop to take a few pictures. You will see a number of these slowly worked their way through the banner (at least when I remember to change it).

These are the full size pictures, just color corrected a little bit.

Longs Peak, the highest point in the picture. There is a reason they are referred to as "purple mountains" in songs

South of Boulder on Highway 93, those are the Flatirons just above Boulder. Its raining in Boulder  Valley but the peaks are clear. Highway 93 follows the foothills between Boulder and Golden (yes, the foothills). These pictures are in sequence from north to south.

I'm just below a ridge line here so after that very clear demarcation between the grass and the foothills is a steep drop into the valley. This valley is one thing that kept Boulder somewhat isolated there are only a couple of ways into the valley that don't involve really steep grades.

South into Golden, passing by one of the hogback formations. If you are high enough and in the right spot you can see a line of these heading north and south. These parallel the foothills and Highway 93 basically goes north and south with the hogbacks on the east side and the foothills on the west.

It was to rainy to bother going into the museum that day (most of it is out doors, and of course the only stuff I want to see is outside). But I did catch BNSF 1600 doing a little switching on the north side of Highway 52 (which goes between the museum and the Coors Brewery). I think he was working the Coors facility that is on this side of the valley.

BNSF is a SD40-2, the pictures definitely suffer from raindrops on my car windows. I guess I need automatic windows now.

While many things seem to be on hold with Calamity right now I have been keeping my eyes open for appropriate pieces for the railroad. This week I managed to acquire the 4-4-0 American steam engine that I wanted to use with Calamity. The 4-4-0 refers to the arrangement of the wheels. In the case of the American it means that there are 4 wheels in the lead (or pony) truck, 2 on each side, 4 drive wheels, again 2 on each side and it does not have a trailing truck. There were 80,000+ 4-4-0 manufactured in the US from before the Civil War and into the next century. With Calamity set, more or less, in the 1870 it is definitely the steam engine that I want to use.

The engine I acquired on Ebay has a steel cab and is probably circa 1910, that's a little on the "new" side for Calamity.  I'm not going to be a terrible stickler for accuracy, it is for a game after all, but I do want it to say wild west. So I need to back date the cab to something a big older. I checked the links I have on my blog and went over to Mount Blue Model Co. to check out what they had. That was a good first choice. They have a laser cut wood cab specifically for the Bachmann 4-4-0. I ordered that on the same day I paid for my American and throw in new wood cupola kit for one of my cabooses. The kits arrived yesterday before the engine arrived (hopefully the engine will be here today, maybe tomorrow, certainly by Monday).

I opened them up last night just to check them out and make sure everything was there. These are beautiful kits and they look like they will build up pretty easy. There are three "sprues" of wood parts for the cab. One of these is obviously pine and it is ultra thin, probably not much more than a millimeter in thickness. The other two "sprues" are a bit thinner and are 1/64th inch plywood, the cab sides will be built up in three layers using these parts. There is some interior detail as well but there should still be room for a couple of gunslingers in the cab.

Here are a few pictures of the components just to give you an idea of what makes up the kit.

The contents

A "sprue" of 1/64" plywood

Another sprue of 1/64" plywood

The roof kit

These are the "metal boiler surround plates'. Essentially this is where the cab will be attached to the train's boiler.

Hard to see, but this package contains the bolt details pieces and the window glazing. I won't open this bag till I need it.

Although my town of Calamity hasn't seen a lot of work lately I have been keeping my eye out for good deals on rolling stock for the railroad portion. For those that haven't been following along I have abandoned my original idea of using S Scale, just do to the lack of equipment available and instead I am using On30. It has the right "feel" because of its narrow gauge proportions even though I consider 1/48th scale to be much to big for 28mm miniatures. I have been able to find some pretty good deals on Ebay and over the last month I have been able to pick up a box car and stock car. I would like to get at least 3-4 more box cars and another stock car so I'll keep my eyes peeled. I'm still looking for reasonably priced steam locomotives as well. I may have to bit the bullet on those. In the meantime I have decided that when I get my turn of the century railroad back up and running I'll be re-doing it in On30 rather than HO so everything can serve double duty as my Colorado and Northwestern RR.

Here are the latest acquisitions.

Nothing like a little care package in the mail! There was a package from the UK in the mailbox today so that meant it was time to bring out the camera to record the unveiling of my ZAS Mech Infantry Co. I took the upgrade to add IFVs and the light Grav Tanks and added three of the Strike Hawks for a little air support. I know that CMG was going to be buried in their very sucessful kickstarter so I ordered some additional support troops before that. While the Kickstarter was still in the pledge stage II ordered three Warmonger Grav Tanks, three Vanquisher SPA vehicles, and three Hellfire SPAA vehicles. I should be able to field a pretty decent force for Tomorrow's War now.

At this point I have received 10 of the 18 Kickstarters I have supported. Only one is really late (and I do mean really late at this point) and five are just now approaching their delivery dates. A couple of them are so far out in the future that I'm likely to forget that I funded them until some thing shows up on the doorstep.

Since the pictures are always better than my words here is some visual reference: