The East Penn Traction Club

Tom Piccirillo's Somerset County Traction System Photo Gallery

Steeplecab #40 6/1/2020

The latest motor to roll out of the O scale Somerset County Traction System shops on June 1, 2020, is this slightly "stretched" version of a Sac Northern 650-series steeple cab. I combined a cab/hood engineering sample acquired from The Car Works with a 1970-era Wagner drive system, which has a longer wheelbase than the stock model and Baldwin, rather than GE, side frames. I used my milling machine to fabricate a new floor from 3/32" thick phenolic sheet. The rest of the chassis was assembled from various components that I had collected over the years. Air tanks were removed from the cab roof and new tanks were installed on the end platforms. Power is controlled by an NCE D408SR decoder (which barely fit in the cab) with a home-built stay-alive circuit; pickup wipers were added to the trucks. Green and gray paint colors, home-made decals and a light spray of weathering completed the model. The first picture shows her switching Round Top on the SCTS; the rest of the pix show her in various stages of construction. Photos by Tom Piccirillo

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