BRASS DETAIL PARTS
Manufacturer: Trackside Details, 1331 Avalon Street, San Luis Obispo, CA 93405. Price: TD-12 Golden Glow headlight with visor and angled number boards, $7.50 each; TD-101 tender ladder with bolts to attach, $11.00 each. California residents please add 7 1/4-percent sales tax. All customers please include $1.50 shipping.
MORE RAILROAD "JEWELRY" from that man we know as The Duke of Details, King of Castings, Prince of Parts and, indeed, the Boss of Brass. His real name, of course, is Pete Thorp. And this time he brings us a pair of brass detail castings to grace our model locomotives fore and aft.
The TD-12 headlight represents the latest version of a so-called Golden Glow design. It is essentially a cylinder with a visor in the front and an angled number board on each side. The improvement is the open sides to simplify illuminating the number boards. It began as one of Trackside Details' earlier castings and a couple of extremely minor imperfections remain. The front edge of the lens housing and of one number board on our sample display a slight roughness. Most modelers probably would find their appearance acceptable; someone more fastidious might prefer to spend three minutes polishing them with a file. The sprue mark on the back of the casting is too big to ignore and the entire back side is a little rough. A few minutes with a Dremel motor tool should leave it flawless.
The TD-101 tender ladder is both attractive and extremely convenient to have available. It will save a lot of modelers a lot of time; instead of facing the daunting and difficult task of building up such a ladder (or part of one), they now need only to snip it off its sprue. The casting measures 2 3/4 inches long by 1/2 inch wide and the rung spacing is exactly 1/2 inch. It does require some "assembly": You must remove the four bolt/washer castings from the sprue. Then insert one through each of the four tabs on the ends of the ladder sides and into holes you will drill in the tender body. Our sample appeared to be very slightly out of square at the top, so the highest rung was not parallel to the ground. It might be possible to correct that after you remove the part from its sprue.
The prototype for the ladder, incidentally, seems to have come from the Denver & Rio Grande Western; identical or similar ladders appeared on every locomotive from the C-16 Consolidations to the K-37 Mikados. That should in no way imply the Rio Grande was the only road whose engines had such ladders. They are very close to innumerable others and, as Pete points out, "the Bachmann 4-6-0 could really use one!"
Both parts should be usable in 1:20.3 and 1:22.5 scales as well as 1:24. They are probably too large for 1:29 or 1:32. Neither sample has any flash. Both are generally clean, crisp, and high quality castings.-RR
