B&O Q3 Mikado

B&O Q3 Mikado

Thank you Lskeetskeet and Mokan for the amazing screenshots!
Hello folks, and welcome back to the USRA era! We have the Baltimore & Ohio’s version of the United States Railroad Administration’s (USRA) 2-8-2 Light Mikado known as the Q3.

READ THIS PLEASE!
As a heads-up folk, you will find this locomotive in your buy menu under “multiple unit” under the steam category. You also MUST have Meatballhero’s Railroad Random & CSX numbers mod, or you will have blank white meshes all over your locomotive. The reason you see it under the multiple unit category is the Random numbers mod. In order for it to work, the locomotive must have a cargo space. That cargo is 1 passenger. So no, you are not crazy if you see this on your freight trains. This is the workaround for getting the random numbers to work. Honestly, well worth it! You must remember to activate both the Mikado and the Railroad Font pack in your mods for this to work.

Slight history
During the first world war, the federal government enacted the USRA as an experiment to nationalize the railroads during a wartime emergency. This lasted from December of 1917 to March of 1920. They introduced standardized locomotive and rail car classes known as the USRA Standard.
Changes occurred quickly as once President Wilson issued the order for nationalization. All the railroads were organized into 3 divisions, East, West, and South. A reduction in passenger service occurred to help with the decongestion of freight. The current number of locomotives and rolling stock was augmented by new production of up-to-date and standardized types/designed to be the best that could be produced to replace outdated equipment.

Enter the USRA Light Mikado! These locomotives were considered well-designed, modern, and successful. The mikado type locomotive was the most numerous across the country. They worked all the way until the diesel started taking over. A total of 625 light Mikado’s were built during the time of the USRA’s tenure, with 641 being built afterward. During the second world war the railroads started referring to the mikado’s as MacArthur’s after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. At the conclusion of the war the name Mikado soon returned.

These locomotives are excellent in freight work and mountain passenger service.

What’s with Mike?
We have 12 B&O Mikados. The variations are in the plow, position of the class lights & 2 tenders.
We have 2 unlettered generic units. So you can run these without having to have B&O on everything!
Plow 1 is your traditional USRA plow.
Plow 2 is step plates
Class lights are either high, low (really mid-smoke box) or None.

Mikado
– With Short 4 Axle tender
– With B&O specific 4 Axle Vanderbilt tender.
– MC Couplers
– Excellent sounds by Mrcheesecake as always!
– So the first USRA pack uses the 4500 series as well. This will change in the future. The B&O pack was numbered
4500-4599 historically.
– All locomotive variations have corresponding assets with fixed road numbers, save for the generic ones with no numbers.
– 8 different camera views

Stats
Availability: 1918
Speed – 59 MPH
Horsepower: 3500
Tractive Effort: 54,724 LBF
Weight: 238,700 lbs.

What’s next with credits
I want to thank Scott Brunner – This locomotive model was originally made for open rails. With taking the model as a solid base I transformed and updated it significantly to almost a brand-new model; well practically. Thank you very much for providing a solid foundation to build off. This helped significantly with timing and movement of this model.
Beyond Scott Brunner this is also a mash-up of my models, and Meatballhero’s meshes. The nice part is during this time a lot of locomotives used very similar parts so using mesh that was already done, and tweaking them to fit the needs of this model was a breeze! Cisco for providing me with the Bettendorf trucks with some edits.

So this is 2 packs down of the USRA Light Mikados. Next up will be the PRR & UP. From there NKP, NYC, and Seaboard. The reason for Seaboard is for the flying pumps, but again there will also be generic versions to run with any train you wish to have these pull.

The USRA locomotives are also ones in which is you simply google USRA and the type of locomotive, you get so many hits on model locomotives. So if you are wanting to reskin these into your own road, you can ask me on the TPF American Modding discord for the PSD’s and create a dependent mod if you wish for the community.

HEADS UP
From this point, please understand that my mods are rather heavy in poly count. Sorry, I enjoy the detail. I put a lot of effort into these, to make them as best I can to be enjoyed. Sorry, if you don’t have enough disk space or computer power to run these.

Required items:
Railroad Fonts Base Pack
Railroad Fonts: CSX Family