Back in 2017 I was incredibly excited to receive my order of four of Intermountain’s Conrail SD40-2s. Seven years, countless hours of work, and quite a few additional dollars later, I’ve decided I’m only keeping one of them. But she does look good…

I have finally completed the Intermountain Conrail SD40-2 that I am keeping (from my total order of four units). Here she is in all her glory.

The Intermountain SD40-2s were a real mixed bag. On one hand, they’re far more advanced models than the only previous option in N: the Kato ones (one of which I had kitbashed into a Conrail unit almost 15 years ago). On the other hand, they had numerous quality issues and “misses” when it came to being accurate models of the iconic Conrail diesel.

From top to bottom, here’s what I had to do to bring them up to my standards:

• New horns. The stock Intermountain ones were just goofy looking tiny things. I did find a use for at least one of them though as a match for the goofy little horn on my Precision National GP9. I fixed the horns by removing the original horns, filling in the mounting holes, and then installing new Kato horns.
• Filled in the holes on the side of the cab. Intermountain decided to make it easy for them to include cab sunshades on the models where they were appropriate by including mounting holes for them on the side of the cab. They didn’t, however, tool a separate version for roads that did not feature this detail so they feature two very obvious holes in the cab sides that are in a difficult place to fill in (they’re recessed in a channel). I fixed these holes by filling them in with some Tamiya white putty.
• Added the cab signal box. Cab signal boxes are one of the two signature details on Conrail diesels. They were missing on the stock models. I fixed this omission by installing the boxes from the Keystone Details Conrail SD40-2 upgrade set that I worked with John LeMerise from Keystone Details on. This also required removing the grab iron that was in the way, although I was lame and didn’t move it over to the other side of the hood.
• Painted the walkways. The walkways on Conrail diesels were black. This was in the factory paint specs and, on models that came from factories painted blue, was very obvious in photos. Intermountain did not reflect this on their models, so I took them apart and painted them black.
• Replaced the couplers with short shank ones. In an effort, I’m assuming, to appease modelers who want to run these models on train set curves, Intermountain shipped them with Micro-Trains long-shank “1016” style couplers. These looked ridiculous, so I replaced them with the short shank equivalent “1015” style ones.
• Under frame “filler” kit. This was a huge part of the upgrades I applied. The stock models have a huge amount of “dead space” between the trucks and the side sills. Initially I thought this space was because the models rode too high, but I realized, to Intermountain’s credit, that this was actually close to accurate. I was so used to the appearance of Kato’s SD series that actually ride too low that I assumed Intermountain got it way wrong. The reality is that they looked “wrong” because Intermountain did not do anything to fill in the space with the frame and other parts as on the prototype (see this Nick Anshant photo that’s in my desktop wallpaper rotation). John’s wonderful kit addressed this by adding frame rails and details that fill in the space in a way that Intermountain should have on their stock models.
• New truck side frames. Conrail’s SD40-2s had a unique feature amongst EMD’s SD40-2 line: they utilized Flexicoil trucks as opposed to the stock HTC trucks on the rest of the production. This was because Conrail (incorrectly) blamed the HTC truck design for the roll-overs of Amtrak’s SDP40Fs and did not want them on their new power. This has been a constant source of struggle for Conrail modelers and manufacturers wanting to create accurate Conrail models. Intermountain was no different and did not address this. I cannot blame them for this, as “doing it right” would’ve required a significant investment in tooling. I worked with Keystone Details to develop a kit to replace the HTC truck side frames with Flexicoil ones. While this resulted in some compromises (that I can’t blame a manufacturer for not wanting to make), I think it vastly improved the resulting model.
• Keep-alive caps attached to the decoder. I think it should be a federal crime to sell sound equipped models without DCC keep-alives. Because I wanted my SD40-2 fleet to truly be outstanding, Steve Ruger from The Railwire graciously installed some for me.

The thing that really bothered me about a number of these “upgrades” are that they are things that I don’t think I should’ve had to do to “top of the line” models that claimed to have road specific details. I will forgive Intermountain not doing the Conrail specific Flexicoil trucks, since those would’ve been very expensive to tool and only applicable for Conrail (and former Conrail) units, but everything else are things that they could’ve easily gotten right at very little expense.

I had implemented all of these fixes to my entire fleet of four units, but when ScaleTrains announced that they were doing Conrail versions of their exquisite SD40-2s, I jumped on the bandwagon.

From the excitement back in 2017…

… to this post today, it’s been a ride. One I’m glad I’ve taken, but I’m looking forward to doing some “lazy modeling” and running my ScaleTrains units.

Here’s a bit of the journey.

My three remaining units are all currently for sale. If you’re interested in them, visit Ed’s Unwanted Models site to get your hands on them before they’re gone.