Our major focus for almost five years has been to persuade a model railroad manufacturer to produce a Ready-To-Run (RTR) Light Rail Vehicle in HO scale. While HO scale was our prime interest, the growth of N scale could not be overlooked. We, along with Volkmar Meier of Paris, France have developed models of the Siemens S70 Ultrashort as used in San Diego, Salt Lake City, and Atlanta. We have assembled. powered and decorated several 3D Printed models of San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (SDMTS), Los Angeles Metro, Boston and San Francisco Light Rail Vehicles all from 3D printed models.
All of these cars are always visible at appearances of the Southern California Traction Club in Southern California. All of our LRV models units are capable of operation on both track power and overhead wire power with TCS "Keep Alive" DCC decoders having been installed.
We have tested these units in three-car consists in DCC on 9" radius curves and they run extremely well together.
We began testing our first N scale model, powered with two Tomytec drives and we have SDMTS decals, set NN-2052 already made for this car. This model is shown with one of our HO scale models and undergoing testing on the new Southern California Traction Club N scale layout.
The HO scale S70 models have been available on Shapeways since September 1, 2017 at the Interurban Models Store! Decals and the Bowser power drive 125158 are available from us!
As part of this project, Bowser developed an HO scale powering mechanism for models of both three truck and two-truck streetcars and light rail vehicles being built by various manufacturers for service in North America.
As these models become available, Custom Traxx will be working on decal sets for them. .
In conjunction with Volkmar Meier, we are also working on HO scale models of the Brookville and the Skoda/Inekon/United Streetcar low floor streetcars as operated in Tucson, AZ; Washington, D.C. and a few other U.S. cities. The HO scale models would use the Bowser traction drive. Our HO scale efforts so far are shown below:
We are keenly aware that the hobby is shifting toward Ready-To-Run models. But we are also mindful of some of the excellent quality 3D printed shells that are now becoming available from Shapeways and other 3D printing houses in both HO and N scales. Since we know that there will always be a few distinguished and talented modelers who would like to have something unique on their layouts, we will be producing some decal sets for some one-of-a-kind vehicles that had their fame for a limited time. Accordingly, we are in the final stages of development and production of these decal sets in HO scale but we are adding N scale for all those newcomers.
