Prepping Maple River for the NEC exhibition this November I took the opportunity to get one of those shelf queens finished.

This Proto2000 HO switcher was last worked on in 2018, I won’t be alone in having shelf queens that have sat around the man cave for lengths of time. What spurred the return to this was setting up the layout to test some OO locomotives in DC. The layout is built for DCC, and literally apart from droppers is ‘only two wires’, so can only be worked on the one engine in steam principle in DC.

A good friend in the US had sent across a contemporary DC version of this Proto2000 model, and that in its clean configuration reminded me of this queen of the shelf. Last time it was worked on was 2018, and the image above confirms that with the Modelu figure in the red resin, and what a journey they’ve had over the period too!

All it took was putting it back together and fitting the glazing, new couplers will be required and some details like air hoses. It’s weird what difference little prompts can have to the man cave shelf queens! Also strange is running the layout as DC with no sounds, the Geep below and the SW1200’s it normally runs with being sound equipped. Whilst I notice the difference, I don’t actually miss the sound element.

It’ll be interesting to see how well the new NEC November show will do, there’s a good cross section of layouts and trade, hopefully it’ll be similar to previous shows, ( in a good way).

Will we see you there?