Sow's Ear Part Four: Rotary Snow Plow

(The starting point)

ATSF didn't have the snow challenges of UP, GN, SP, DRGW, or the Canadian roads, but they have always had a few Rotaries on the MOW roster. Designed by a Canadian in the late 1800s and manufactured by few companies and some by railroads themselves, the basic Leslie design remains in use today, typically diesel powered.

I picked up a used Athearn in GN lettering. A bit of fiddling and I had its primitive rubber band drive system working, although long term I'd like it dcc / electric motor operated. This is a steam model, keeping it in  a pre-1950s timeframe. Lacking a tender, I will source that separately and paint and letter them as a set. At this point, I am thinking of going with steam era black with silver lettering, like a unit that has yet to be upgraded to diesel power, heavily weathered, the last of its kind, but still ready to work when called.

The tender I sourced is a fairly generic Mantua "long haul" tender.

To mate with this generation of plow, it will need to be converted from Coal to Oil, as all the controls to fire it are forward near the plow operator's station, the smokebox at the rear. We will set it up for dcc conyrol and sound to resemble ATSF tenders such as these:

This will require removing and rebuilding the upper portion of the former coal bunker from curved to straight, and buding the oil bunker. We'll also remove cast on grabirons and replace with better, and give it a working backup light.

Coal load and grabirons removed:

Sheet styrene for new straight bunker sides.

Fabbed the rectangular oil bunker insert out if sheet styrene.

Hatches also styrene. .015 phosphor bronze wire railings, hatch handles, and grabirons.

Base layer of paint. Time to source some decals.

Naturally,  the plow needs to be repainted in "steam era black".

I had to manufacture a drawbar to connect the flexible draftvgear box on the plow with the post on the tender,  sheet styrene to the rescue. A set of Microscale Steam Engine and Tender decal sets provided some numbering and labels. I chose a fictitious MOW car no. 199360, putting it right before the actual SF plow 199361.

Next, I'll procure a set of Railroad Roman letter decals to finish the labeling. In the mean time, I added some shadows to the plow blades:

Of course, I couldn't help giving it a brief test drive...😁