Since my wife and I went to Colorado and rode the Durango & Silverton two years ago, I've been acquiring pieces for a D&S style tourist train for the L&SE. This week I finally added the last car.
Legend has it that one of the managers of the L&SE visited the Denver & Rio Grande and happened to see a western movie being filmed there. He figured that the Lockwood Valley is a heck of a lot closer to Hollywood than Colorado, so his little railroad ought to be able to grab some of that business.
When he got home, he had the shop crew clean up one of the engines, and painted it and a couple of old passenger cars in a snazzy paint scheme that was strangely reminiscent of the D&RGW narrow gauge. Ads in the Hollywood trade papers soon brought film crews to shoot action scenes in the San Emigdio Mountains. With the addition of an open excursion car and a caboose, the same equipment brought in some added revenue hauling tourists on weekends.
My Durango & Silverton inspired tourist train includes two Bachmann passenger cars in factory Bumblebee paint and a Bachmann excursion car.
The excursion car was bright red with yellow end railings; I repainted it in Badger Modelflex Dark Tuscan and black railings.
The combine was factory lettered for Denver & Rio Grande. I'll remove the road name from the letterboards and reletter for L&SE. I'll leave the rest of the lettering as it is.
The coach came painted but unlettered. The last couple of evenings I've been working on it. I started by removing the factory lighting, replacing it with an LED light driver board from Jack Regan and a strip of 5 volt, warm white LED tape lights.
I'm lettering it using a 1/8 inch Extended Roman alphabet decal set from K4 Decals (the yellow letters) and some numbers from an old Champ D&RGW lettering set.
I've been running these cars with a Bachmann offset cupola shorty caboose, lettered for Durango & Silverton. I don't plan to reletter that caboose, since it's a memento of our trip to Durango, but may eventually replace it with a Mount Blue caboose.
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