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I'm Randy Gordon-Gilmore, and ProtoTrains is a very part-time business to make kits of the 1930's streamliner passenger trains in N scale. The "Proto" in ProtoTrains denotes two things-- the prototype, or pioneering, nature of the trains, and my desire to be as prototypically accurate as possible ("fanatical" is a term that has been used ) in modeling the trains. The main focus of ProtoTrains will be the Burlington Route's shovelnose Zephyr trains.

January 2011 - ProtoTrains is up and running. Buy a poster!

Projects

Renascence poster The Renascence poster, a longtime dream of mine to print, is produced and for sale! This poster is a full-size reproduction of the Burlington Route's 1935 calendar top painting of the Pioneer Zephyr.

Pioneer Zephyr ProtoTrains started with my collaboration with Dick Billings of Fine N-Scale Products to develop the very popular and successful Pioneer Zephyr kit, which we introduced at the 1996 Long Beach convention. With the release and popularity of the Con-Cor ready-to-run PZ, FNS has discontinued the PZ kit.

Flying Yankee A long-term (and extremely delayed) project I'm working on is a similar kit of the Boston & Maine/ Maine Central Flying Yankee, a very similar train to the PZ which ran in New England from the mid-1930's to the 1950's. I'm really going to try to have the model ready by the time the prototype is back in operation!

Silver Charger UPDATED 23 Jan 2013 The General Pershing Zephyr, was a four-car non-articulated train pulled by the last Burlington shovelnose, #9908 Silver Charger, which still exists in the National Museum of Transport in St. Louis. Kato ran the prewar corrugated Budd cars a few years ago, of which the coach and obs are based on the GPZ design. As of 2012 they are running the cars again as part of their E5 sets. I have started 3D modeling 9908's body shell, to be "printed" in Frosted Ultra Detail material by Shapeways, to be mounted on a modified E-unit chassis.

EA, EB units NEW 9 Jan 2013 OK, I couldn't help myself and started on the model for the A units Pegasus, Zephyrus (for the second Twin Zephyrs), Silver King and Silver Knight (for the first Denver Zephyrs). The B units Silver Queen and Silver Princess will be simple modifications. These models are in a very early stage also. They will possibly have a custom split-frame chassis on which to mount Life-Like FA mechanicals.

Aeolus NEW 17 Jan 2013 I have rebooted the Aeolus project, starting with modeling the loco shell in 3D. The shell (and upcoming tender shell) will likely need to be customized for a particular 4-6-4 mechanism.

My equipment

Photoetching

• A Home Photoetching Operation, Chapter 1
• A Home Photoetching Operation, Chapter 2
• A Home Photoetching Operation, Chapter 3
• Photoresist Update
• Laminator Update
• Photoetching Clinic Overheads
  • I gave a clinic on my photoetching at the N-Scale Gathering in San Jose on 3 and 4 August 2000. These are the overheads which I used as the outline of my talk, formatted four-up for printing and saved in PDF format.
• A brief note on PnP Blue.
• The original photoetching patent! British Patent 561,524 awarded to John Jonson Snellman in 1944.

Machine tools

• My mill is a Tormach PCNC1100 which I purchased in October 2006.
• My lathe is a Feeler FSM-59, a Hardinge 2d-op clone, for which I have fabricated a CNC X-Z mechanism.
• I formerly owned a much-modified Sherline 5400 CNC mill and a Techno-Isel gantry fitted with a Sherline milling head, both of which I sold when I bought the Tormach, and a Sherline 4400 CNC lathe.

Other articles

• First-generation shovelnose Zephyrs (Flying Yankee too!) comparitive side-view drawing with car lengths:
  • N scale Three-page on 8.5x11 inch sheets (164kb PDF file)
  • HO scale Four-page on 11x17 inch sheets (176kb PDF file)
  • Z scale Two-page on 8.5x11 inch sheets (182kb PDF file)
• Some of the Patents issued for the shovelnose Zephyrs (and the Pendulum Car)
• Railroad Easement Template program
• Railroad Turnout Drawings in N and HO scales. UPDATED 2 Dec 2012
• Stub Turnout Template program
• I am interested in finescale N, and am starting to work on turnout soldering fixtures.

Bicycle stuff

• Bicycle Wheel-Building Instructions and Spoke Chart, posted on the Web by kind permission of Raleigh Industries.

  This is a 300dpi, 7.5MB PDF containing Raleigh publications AD4935 (Instructions) and AD5031 (Spoke Chart). The booklet and chart are undated, but from the document numbers I surmise that they might be from 1949 and 1950, respectively. I cleaned up the pages somewhat after scanning, but kept a high resolution to maintain the "look and feel" of the booklet--and the wonderful cover illustration of Sturmey-Archer hubs being built into wheels!

Links

Links verified 17 Jan 2013.
Article-specific links appear in their respective pages.

Software

• MeshCAM CNC Software (I'm a moderator on the support forum)
• SheetCam 2.5D CAM software

Prototype railroad

• Burlington Route Historical Society

General model railroading

• The 2mm Scale Association Finescale, largely scratchbuilt models, based in the UK
• RailFonts Benn Coifman's excellent railroad fonts

Coded by hand in Alan Phillips' excellent PFE32 freeware text editor.
(Alan's website is offline, so just do a websearch for "pfe101i.zip")
Checked using HTML Validator.

This website should be viewable using any browser that you have;
if you can't see everything properly, please let me know and I'll fix it!

This website and all its contents is ©2002-13 Randy Gordon-Gilmore.
Established 4 July 2002. Last updated: 17 Jan 2013.
Changed webhosting 25 Aug 2010--if you find anything broken please let me know.