The Background: I've been busy the last few days. I have been trying to put together a nice video of the Mike's Train House (MTH) O-Gauge Railking Hiawatha. The real Hiawatha was a named train of The Chicago, Milwaukee, St.Paul and Pacific Railroad, also called the Milwaukee Road and made its inaugural run on 29 May, 1935 . The engines, designed by famed industrial designer Otto Kuhler, were some of the fastest steam engines ever built. The styling is beautiful and timeless and is my favorite engine. There are many toy and scale representations of these trains and the Railking version, while not to exact scale, is a very nice representative. The cars are generic MTH passenger cars as the real Hiawatha had a more distinctive look and the observation car had a very distinctive 'beaver tail' design, quite unlike the Railking version.
The Video: I took 19 separate videos - some short, some long - and chose Duane Eddy's "40 Miles of Bad Road' as the musical accompaniment as a nod to my sometimes less than stellar track laying :-) This was my first video with a portion shot with most of the lights out in The Cave relying on lights from the layout as well as the lights on the passenger cars to provide illumination. I also had a couple of old Milwaukee Road jingles which were added at the beginning and the end of the video. The engine itself just didn't want to smoke like it should have during filming. The smoke unit finally came alive when I started to take still photos. By that time it was too late to start taking videos again (the wife was calling me into the house and I was pooped - no more video taking that day). The video itself was crafted using Roxio Creator 2010 software. It had been a few months since I used it last and had to re-learn a lot of things. So far I'm pretty pleased with it, although after it crashing a few times I finally learned to save my work frequently. AND THEN, once I posted the video to YouTube (I call it Y'allTube) I noticed I had spelled the name of my own railroad wrong!! DRATS! My YouTube moniker is 'marxtoynut' and you'll notice two postings for the video - the original one and the corrected one. Here's the link to the CORRECTED video:
The Stills: After finishing the video's I began to take still photos and some of them are presented here. I was experimenting with different camera angles and some of the photos show the engine smoking, while others don't. If you're a Milwaukee Road Hiawatha fan I hope you enjoy the photos and the video!
