Wednesday, July 6, 2022

The #160 A-unit has arrived with a bonus.

I just added one more piece of my El Capitan set the rare (probably because no one really wants them) non-powered 6-28905 A-unit road number 160 (seen in the back of the picture below). These locomotives were manufactured to be an add-on for the 6-30001 El Capitan set and were sold in the 2009-2010 catalog.


However, this #160 unit came as part of a $200 eBay bundle that included a complete 6-30001 set. The set included the standard powered #158 6-24568, 2 Chair Cars, and an Observation car. The extra set of passenger cars will definitely be added to the garage consist because I've always felt my "all chair car" El Capitan was seriously lacking chair cars.

My intention was to swap the shells and run the powered 6-24568 with the #160 6-28905 shell so I can have two power units pulling my consist. The extra power will be helpful as my El Capitan consist is now 11 cars. But after further review, I've determined it will be easier to simply re-number the 6-24568. Both use the exact same shell as the cast numbers are identical but the 6-24568 shell has all the lights and engineer figurines hot-glued in place. Rather than hacking them all up, I will work on making a new set of white-on-black number decals. Maybe the decal project will motivate me to make new numbers for the duplicate 3103 and 3105 cars as well.

The last piece of the puzzle is to replace my 1996 6-18129 RailSounds B-Unit with one or two matching 4-window 6-38204 B-Units. I really like the rail sounds, but the 6-38204 is the correct B-Unit to complete this set.

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