The Southern Pacific Railroad owned 339 hard-working GP9 diesel locomotives. They were ubiquitous right up until the UP merger, and, to me, symbolize the SP like no other. Of course I had to have them for my model railroad!
But nothing is ever that simple.
I started with an HO scale model (the small one in the picture) which was not really a GP9 at all: it was a GP18 kit made by Proto2000. Still, close enough for my purposes ...until I got the great idea to build an accurately super-detailed GP9 locomotive ...in O scale, which is larger--larger enough to see the painstaking details, I hoped!
Well, it definitely is, and this is what I wasn't prepared for: I knew O scale was twice as long as HO, but it turns out that it's also twice as tall and twice as wide. My new model GP9 is eight-times bigger!! Yes, O scale models have volume and mass that would make Archimedes proud.
The problem is that instead of the expected twice-as-much amount of detail, the locomotive project is soaking up orders-of-magnitude more.
Don't even ask how much more time is going into this either.
(If you want to know what to get me for Christmas, Athearn make a beautifully detailed HO scale GP9 now)
(PS--the O scale GP9 is a discontinued Red Caboose kit. And don't get me started on rebuilding the drive-train or if I am going to build it to Proto48 standards)
