A working Intermountain SD40-2 chassis with DCC was recently up for bid on ebay for a ridiculously small opening bid. I bit. Intermountain has a great reputation and builds nice stuff. Price continued to be really low until the last couple of days of the auction when it crept over $50 and over my max bid. Still a good price, but not a steal. I put one more bid in and won it. Now what?
Conrail's Day One roster included some SD40's - Penn Central had some, the Jersey Central Red Barons, etc. I could have had a leased unit from a foreign road (I've always wanted a SP bloody nose unit). I could have dug around for an SD40 shell, but among Conrail's first locomotive purchases from EMD included the SD40-2, which was a great leap forward in terms of modular locomotive design in the Dash 2 units (SD38-2, SD40-2 and SD45-2). The SD40-2 was the big seller and a fine locomotive - some of which are still on the rails today. I figured it was time to add a blue loco to the roster (even though the first to arrive didn't do so until 1977). Close enough.
There weren't any Intermountain SD40 or SD40-2 shells out there for sale. For that matter, Athearn blue box shells were also on the fairly expensive side and typically didn't include glass or railings. Started looking for dummy units and found something on the cheap end - it was a weathered SD40-2 Athearn blue box unit. Bought it for under $20 and tried a test fit over the Intermountain Chassis - too tight, but I thought maybe I could adapt it. The dummy shell had some damaged areas and the weathering was too extensive to represent a brand new addition to the Conrail fleet. A new project was born!
The fit was too tight for several reasons - one of which was the tightness near the front and rear steps. Supports for the front and rear pilots were also not accomodated by the Intermountain chassis - they were the first things to go (using cutters and/or Dremel bits) along with the protrusions of each and every railing around the shell:
The front pilot was a bit warped due to heat and/or dropping, but I figured I could make it work because I wanted to add a prototypical snowplow (the blue box units didn't have plows and had the big "slide-in" pilots on the front and rear. Ordered a plow from Details West along with MU hoses.
Even with taking out the pilot supports, the chassis wouldn't fit on the front and rear. Took the Dremel cutting wheel to the corners of the chassis:
The chassis width also slightly exceeded the shell confines, so there was a lot of grinding and sanding to get the shell to lay flat over all areas of the chassis. There were also extra Athearn blue box mounting holes that adapted to the Athearn frame. I filled in the holes with epoxy and sanded them flat before cutting the lower portion of these plastic protrusions.
The shell was a mess. Weathered to maybe look 10 years old or so, but wasn't the look I was going for. I tried removing the extra weathering with alcohol and abrasion, but it still wasn't looking good enough. Also the previous owner had glued each railing and connection tight to the body and then painted the railings with a paint that didn't quite match the shell. I ended up ordering decals and repainting the entire shell Conrail blue and then hand painting the black floor portions and weathering the intakes and exhaust with some black, and the front and rear railings white:
Here's some pix of the snowplow and MU hose integration:
Next I added number boards (the originals were white numbers on a black background, made them out of self-adhesive stickers printed using my inkjet printer. I then had to trial-and-error the wiring harness since Intermountain doesn't have anything on their site regarding colors and/or pinout of their lighting harness.
Here she is as a finished unit:
A couple of points on this unit. All of the Conrail SD40-2's (there were over a hundred of them) were purchased with Flexicoil trucks (versus the standard HTC trucks). Intermountain doesn't make a Flexicoil 3 axle truck and they aren't compatible with say an Athearn SD45 truck face, so I'm just going to live with the HTC trucks. Otherwise, this is a fairly close approximation to one of the early SD40-2's that Conrail ordered.
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