The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

I've managed to acquire most of the items I need to build my own switches.  One hang up was that I had a bunch of stuff shipped to a friend's PO Box in Blaine Washington (just over the border from us) to save on postage as there is a significant difference between shipping in the US versus to Canada.   Unfortunately the border was closed to cross border traffic due to the pandemic just after the items arrived in the PO Box.  My friend finally decided to have everything shipped by a broker so after almost a year (!?) I finally got the track building supplies.  Funny thing is with the brokerage fees I ended up paying roughly what it would have cost to ship directly to Canada!  Ah well, such goes life.   After watching the Fast Tracks instructional guide  on Youtube (an 11 part series in 12 parts) I got underway.  I managed to follow the instructions and have built two #6 switches so far.  Both seem to be of decent quality so I'll...

The lightweight trio leads 4 standard GP9 into the smelter in Flin Flon.  The 70T waits for them to yard the train so it can start its work. I've been working on a trio of lightweight GP9 for the Hudson Bay Railway.  These were common power on the northern network from the 1960's through 1980's.  They are a bit of a challenge to model as most rode on Flexicoil trucks and had other modifications from standard Geeps.   I used Rapido trucks from their GMD-1 model along with Athearn Genesis GP9 to build two of my units, while a third kept its factory Blomberg trucks to represent a unit that had its Flexicoils removed. I substituted a P2K shell for one unit as I had already started modifying it.  I decided it would be easier to use the Athearn drive instead of the P2K drive as it was pretty much a swap out.  I have an extra Athearn CN GP9 for future use.  Maybe I'll put it on a P2K drive.   I am planning a future post about the details of thi...