The USA Trains NW2 is a great starting point for bashing into a SW1.
90% of the work is simply shortening the body on both ends.
then changing the small details.

(drawings from railroad paintshop. http://paintshop.railfan.net )

I bought a Conrail NW2 to use for this bash.
(sweet revenge.. Conrail gets converted BACK to LV! )
 

October 11, 2005

I took some photos of my Conrail NW2, and did some measuring and cutting in photoshop.

first, the victim, a USA trains Conrail NW2:

so..where to cut the shell??
To keep it simple, I only want to make 2 cuts, remove one chunk of shell, then paste the two pieces back together..
im not concerned with absolute 100% accuracy, with things such as louvers and doors and hinges and all that.
If the number of doors isnt perfect, I wont care..and no one will ever notice anyway!
So as long as the "big dimensions" are correct, im not going to worry about the little things.

Time to do some "photoshop kitbashing"!
always a favorite part of the model making experience for me.
all the following "digital kitbashing" imagry was done with Adobe Photoshop.

First, I drew two lines on the SW1 drawing, to see where the outer edges of the body fall in relation to the trucks:
 

then, looking at the position of the lines on the SW1 drawing, I drew in the same lines on my side-view of the actual locomotive..using truck details to place the lines:

then I measured the distance between both ends of the NW2 and the lines, added the two distances together, and it came out to 234 pixels.
So I need to remove 234 pixels from the body of the locomotive.
I drew a box 234 pixels wide and moved it around to various places on the locomotive, to see if a nice and neat chunk can be removed, hopefully neatly removing whole doors..
it didnt quite work..I can remove 3 whole doors, and part of a 4th door.
which should look ok because the real SW1 has some "thin" doors on its side anyway..
So here is the chunk to be removed:

closer up:

remove the chunk:

Put the lines back, then move the front and rear to match up with the lines, and they should meet up nice and neat:

neaten it up, paint it red, and we have a SW1! [:D]
woo!

I will probably re-measure the length of the cut, because using a side-view photo isnt quite accurate..USA trains very conviently provides a drawing of the locomotive on their boxes, so I will use that and see if I need to modify the cut..but this is very close.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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