Scratchbuilding a Shay: A case study in obsessive-compulsive detailing
An HO scale project that grew and grew/Alan Mende
Chimney Rock’s Shay No. 3 handles a string of empty hoppers off the CNJ interchange bound for loading at the quarry (above). What started out as an HO scale kitbashing project ended up as
W
hy in the world would anyone in their right mind want to scratchbuild a Shay when
there are so many good (and not so good) ones available? Well, this didn’t start out as a scratchbuilding project. I have always been fascinated by
an exercise in scratchbuilding. This photo (below) shows the size difference between the two-cylinder, two-truck Keystone Shay and Bachmann’s larger three-cylinder, three-truck model.
Shays. I’ve ridden behind them at Cass and a long time ago on the Pine Creek Railroad at Allaire State Park in New Jersey. And, ever since I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, I lusted af- ter one of the PFM Class B brass beau- ties in the glass display case of The
Model Railroad Shop in Dunellen, New Jersey. But even when they sold for around fifty dollars in the 1960’s, I couldn’t afford one. Besides, “my” rail- road was the Jersey Central. In all the intervening years, I’ve become a proto- type modeler of Miss Liberty’s road during the steam to diesel transition, but I’ve never lost my love of Shays– even as the price of brass versions of them rose with inflation.
Not too many years after my wife and I got married, Keystone Locomo- tive Works released an unpowered, cast metal Class A Shay patterned af- ter Kelley Island Lime & Transport No. 31 (Lima construction number 1855). I could afford one of them, so af- ter reading the review of the kit in the September, 1977, issue of Model Rail- roader, I bought one. Not long after- ward, North West Short Line brought out a powering kit for the Keystone Shay. I bought one of them, too, and both kits languished unbuilt for many
72 MARCH 2014
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