GP40's and a GP7R

Someday I'll get back to the scenery, just not sure when? But for now the juices are flowing.  After getting the U25B & U28B refurbished, the gears started turning again.

Next up: Two GP40's and a GP7R.

All three will be in the Red and Yellow scheme.

The GP40's will have two different numbers from different orders.

One will be in the high 300 series that got repainted, the other will be in the low 4700 series that were delivered in Red and Yellow.

The GP7 will be a rebuilt GP7R in the 1200 series which was rebuilt and painted by Morris-Knudson during the CRP (Capital Rebuilding Program). Unfortunately some didn't stay in Red and Yellow very long as the Rock Island officials decided shortly afterwards that they were going to start painting their locos in the Blue and White. 

So some of the Red and Yellow GP7R's were repainted as soon as they were delivered back to the Rock Island and were renumbered into the 4400 and 4500 series, but some did retained their original numbers and the Red and Yellow paint until the end.

The images are not mine, I use them for reference only.

Refurbished U25B and U28B

I decided to work on a couple of locos again before working on the layout.

I did up these two U25B's back around 1995, a few years before I switched over to DCC.  These units have been in storage since then.  I recently was deciding how many U25B's I wanted for my fleet and which paint schemes I wanted to portray them in when I remember I had these two.

They're both U25B's but the 253 is actually numbered for an early version U28B, which were for all  practical purposes U25B's except they had 2800 hp.  The late U28B had the cab moved forward which gave the traditional stubby nose look of the later GE units.

Overall these looked pretty good as far as the paint and weathering went, but the only thing I had to do was to repaint the handrails as most of the paint had flaked off since they were made from Delrin and I didn't know about using a plastic adhesion promoter.  

I redid the number boards with Shell Scale decals and also swapped out the older DC chassis for a newer DCC chassis then added an LED headlight.

Not sure how many more U25b's & U28b's I'll paint up but there are at least 6 more schemes I'd like to add, but that's for another time.