Bashing Old into New Katos in HO

[dablaze]

I am not sure what generations I am dealing with but I have an SD40 that my dad painted and gave to me for my birthday years ago. Dad passed and never completed it so I am working to finish it off. One issue is that my chosen Railroad, The Ontario Northland didn’t run 40’s they ran 40-2’s. I want to run this but my sense of "what's right" won't let me run an ONR SD40. I have a few extra 40-2 Katos around and not all are candidates (Kato generational differences) but since the body itself is the right dimensions, I am working on putting the 40 body on a 40-2 walkway and chassis. Maybe from the pics someone in the know can name what generation Katos I am using. I know the end result will have some details (Grills wrong but I do want to preserve it as much as I can as the loco my dad gave to me.

[dablaze]

Here is the shell, I had to remove the tabs that held the body and walkways together as they are in different positions. The walkway does need some cutting/massaging (Shortening the heater box on the other side by 1/8th inch and removing some positioning pins inside the cab) as they are slightly different but all that is hidden once the shell goes on.

[dablaze]

As You can see, the lengths will be different when the walkway is on the one on the left. The inner spacing for the body are the same though, other than the little plastic clips and holes, I removed the clips and glued the body to the walkway with CA. the coupler boxes will hold the body in place well enough. To be clear, the black one has a walkway, the grey one is just the frame, the walkway is longer but is glued to the shell already. You can see from the length of the mechanisms that the fit does work.


Next step will be removing some chassis metal, you can see that on the area where the cab fits, the metal frame is higher on the 40-2 vs the 40 frame (I am not sure if this was due to the different series or the generation of Katos) It does not look like the additional metal at the rear (not pictured) will be an issue so I should only need to remove some for the cab clearance.