Restoring a Southern Pacific Mountain
MT-4
This page follows the progress of the restoration of an old brass Southern Pacific Mountain locomotive.
The “Project” locomotive
The brass model is an old HO scale Balboa / KMT model of a MT-4 with a skyline casing. This particular version of the model also has alligator crossheads and a disk main driver. Southern Pacific MT-4’s were originally built with alligator crossheads that were often changed to multiple bearing crossheads at a later date. The MT-4’s were also originally built with spoked main drivers. Problems with cracking led to using disk drivers as replacements.
In the late 1940’s five of the SP Mountains were repainted in a “Daylight” paint scheme for use on trains number 51 and 52 of the San Joaquin Daylight. I think this is a particularly attractive paint scheme that is fairly rare to see on a model. While the daylight painted GS4’s are very common, I haven’t seen any commercially offered mountains in the “Daylight” paint scheme. For this reason, and also for the challenge of painting a C-160-1 tender in daylight, I decided to try and match up this model with one of the five daylight mountain engines.
From 1946 to 1951 locomotive number 4353 was painted in the “Daylight” paint scheme. Number 4353 was also equipped with the alligator crossheads and disk main driver. Armed with this prototype information I decided that I would paint my model as number 4353.
Here are a couple of prototype photos of number 4353 painted in “Daylight”:
Page 1 - Last updated April 19, 2004