I've always liked box cabs and steeple cab electric locomotives. So in order to have something to run at the live
steam club I decided to build an electric box cab, a wooden box cab that is. I searched through Live Steam and Modeltech
and didn't find anything that I liked. So I decided to look through my model railroad magazines (MR,RMC,NGSLG,etc.)
and I found what I was looking for in the February 1982 issue of Model Railroader. The Piedmont & Northern box cab
locomotive. The size was about right. It gave me a good starting point to draw up some plans. The biggest stumbling
block was the trucks. I don't think any 1 1/2" model manufacturer has something like these out on the market. So after
many months of head scratching I stumbled on a way to at least get full size, for the model, dimensions. I scanned
in the drawing and converted it to an Adobe Acrobat Reader format, which my scanning program will out put. I then brought it
up on the screen. I used the "zoom in" feature until the size of the wheel base equaled a scale that was held to the screen
and I got the right dimension. For example the wheel base is 7'2" on the prototype, which converts to 10.750" in
1 1/2" scale. Since there was a center line thru the wheel base all I needed was half that dim. or 5.375". Now I had
something to start with. I scaled dimensions of the screen and drew the first part in Autosketch and then plotted
it out on my 7550 HP plotter at full scale. Now I can scale all the other sizes of parts needed to make the trucks.
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