The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.
2023-01-20 - Branchline Update: SP GP9 #3566
Category RandallOK so since the newly revived Rapido RDC SP 10 on the Branchline is already out of commission, I’ve temporarily set up one of Jim’s engines on the Branchline. The engine we have now is Southern Pacific GP9 #3566 in its Black Widow scheme:
The engine seemed to behave nicely for a couple runs. Later I will add one or two cars and a caboose, one at a time, double checking they all can stand the Branchline rough track.
The espee.railfan.net site does not have a picture of a real 35xx GP9 unit in the same paint scheme, however the NCRy has an excellent picture of SP GP9 5623 to give you an idea of how gorgeous the real thing is (the main difference is that 3566 has the dynamic brakes whereas 5623 is a passenger unit with the “torpedo tubes” air tanks on the roof).
I’ll need to revisit my branchline program because I got the sound wrong. Apparently that’s one of these engines where F8 is a mute option (e.g. sound is on by default) whereas I reused the RDC program that used F8 to turn on the sound (e.g. sound off by default). The sound is on when parked and it’s silent when running. Oops.
For my own reference: This is a LikeLike Proto 2000 model “by Walthers”; that means a QSI Quantum decoder.