This is my 4th update for my 3ds Max work in progress, a Balwin steam locamotive. If you missed the other posts, click on the following links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Click the link below to see the rest of this post:

I edited a couple of things before I moved on from my last post. First, I changed the whistle. I made my previous whistle based on a photo I found of a steam train whistle which had a rounded top. It looked like this:

The whistles in the reference drawing, and train photos had a flat top, so I looked around the web some more and found this photo below and was able to remodel the top part of the whistle:

I need to change the headlight bracket/stand too, but my efforts to make it look like the reference have failed, so I am leaving the current light stand for now, and will come back to it later. In the meantime I’ll try to think of other modeling methods to try. It doesn’t look like a hard piece, but it has me stumped right now.

I also edited the angle of the pipe that leads from the whistle to the cab. I had it going straight into the cab, parallel to the ground, but the drawing shows it angles down. Here is the drawing again so that you don’t have to go looking for my first post:

I built a work shed for my train. Go ahead and laugh if you want. I can reuse it when I make a model-T Ford in the future and anything else. The corrugated iron walls are a bit out of scale from real life, but when I scale them down the texture becomes all stretched and looks bad. In the future I’ll try to solve this by sizing down the original texture photo and see if that works, otherwise I’ll just say that it is super-sized, heavy duty corrugated iron. The iron walls are old, but I have just poured a new cement slab over the old dirt floor. The drums can hold a heavy weight too, they are full of cement. Now my work scene is a bit more fun to look at while modeling.

In the first image, you can see I have also darkened the paint somewhat to get away from the “Flying Scotsman” green that I was using before. This colour is what I am going for, but from this view it is in shadow. The real colour is brighter, which you’ll see in the images of the other side that is in the sun (yes the shed has no roof. Pretend there is an enormous skylight ). I can’t make it so that the green is this colour on the sunny side, otherwise it will look black in the shade. I may tweak the colour again after the train is finished and is composited in a proper scene to get the green looking dark in whatever lighting is in the finished scene.

You’ll also see that I have added most of the stuff on the front and some pipes on the side of the boiler.

Click the images below to see a large size. After the large image opens, click on it again if your mouse cursor looks like a magnifying glass (firefox users) and it will go even bigger.

View of the front:

The cow killer:

I have been calling it a cow killer in my mind because I could see no other use for it, except maybe for decoration/design. Very few other trains need to have it. I have looked it up, apparently it is called a “cowcatcher”. I was the only person in the world not to know this, since typing “Baldwin cowcatcher” into Google brings back many thousands of hits. It’s used for “clearing away” cows off the tracks, one website says. I don’t think it would “catch” the cows. It would kill them, and if it didn’t, the thing coming along close behind it would. I wonder if the design with the “spokes” was well thought out. Surely after hitting a cow, it’d be hard (tedious) to clean all the mess out from between the spokes. My guess they kept making them like this because they never hit any cows, so they never found out the hard way. The cow saw this large pointing thing heading towards them at great speed so the decided to walk off the track out of the way.

They must have hit a cow at some stage though, so they did find out how hard they were to clean, and so stopped making the cowcatcher (I’m rewriting locomotive history here). Probably what happened was, there was a cow on the tracks looking the other way. It got skewered from behind, but the driver (engineer) never felt a thing while he was reading the paper, and passengers on the platform at the next station were horrified at the sight when they saw the train come in. They took away the cowcatcher after that. Yeah, that’s what must have happened.

I found this (amazing what you’ll find):

Other images:

I feel like working on the driving wheels now, so that’s what I’ll do. I still have other stuff to finish from around the areas I have worked on, indicated in red below. I have no idea what that is inside the green box, it’s not on any train photos that I have seen.

I found this great photo. Finally I have something large and clear to look at. It’s not the same train, but it clearly shows the headlight bracket (I’ll work from this in my next attampt), the cylinder thing on the side of the boiler near the cab and the whistle is the same as my revised whistle. I think what this photo is about, as far as I can tell anyway, is that the driver is apologising to a couple of women for deliberately running over their dog while they pick various limbs out from under the train. Taking advantage of the distraction is an old woman in the foreground who is making off with the large cookie jar from the buffet car, which was supposed to feed everyone at afternoon tea time.

Click to enlarge: