I'd just like to share with you the story behind my acquisition of this Stewart/Bowser RTR Southern Pacific Bicentennial U25BE #6800 - meant to represent a full 50% of SP's foray into remanufacturing their old tired U25Bs into born-again "U25BE"s. My wife procured one of these little beauties for my birthday, and ever since then, I just could not leave "good enough" alone. So about five minutes after unwrapping the gift, I headed straight to the workbench, and promptly snipped the footboards off to better represent the modernized FRA-compliant pilots common to locomotives in the late 1970s.

My next thought was.. so.. do we have another project here that will languish for months on my workbench vying for attention? I concluded that since it was a gift from my sweetie, I resolved that this answer would be "no", and so work continued on a time-available basis.

I continued with work on the pilots.. I just could not stand the crappy factory supplied details, and replaced the stock MU hoses with ones from Details West. Other mods include:

1) Scale-width (or nearly-so) coupler pockets built using Evergreen styrene.
2) New "riveted" .005 styrene plate on roof on which the new horn and SP-style bell sit per SP U25BE practice. Thanks to Liz for the tips!
3) New pilot plates and MU hose keepers on lower 1/3 of pilot (.005 Evergreen styrene again)
4) All-new coupler lift bars bent from phosphor-bronze wire. .008, but it still looks okay to me.
5) Revised the end of the long hood to remove the numberboard casting. I debated about this one, but well, again, I slipped down that slippery slope a bit more..
6) Replaced both of the stock air tanks with new ones from Details West. Had to mill the frame first, to get the air tanks to sit right. Thanks to Elizabeth Allen for milling off that extra cruft in front of the fuel tanks!
7) New wheelslip recorders were also mounted onto the truck sideframes. Thanks to Thom Anderson for the use of his sandblasting facility to prep the sideframes for paint!
8) New windshield wipers to replace the grossly oversized RTR brass ones.
9) Misc. fuel gauges and Emergency fuel cutoff switches and moisture trap paraphenelia added to the underframe. .010 sheet added to front and rear of said fuel tank to represent the "lip".
10) And a few more changes yet to come (including some new paint to touch up the affected areas!)

For the rivet-counters out there, um.. no.. I'm not planning to change all the hood doors with EMD-style ones per the real U25BEs. So consider this just a minor detail project. *grin*

Last updated 4/06/2008

All photos (c) 2008 - Harry K. Wong. All rights reserved.