I've had this massive kit (DeAgostini, came in 100 installments, each installment with a booklet and various parts of the train) for a few years (it took 2 years just to get all the parts) and last weekend I figured it was finally time to start building. One of the reasons is that the various installments are stored in about 7 boxes, which take up a lot of space ;)
Rather than follow the instructions exactly, I started with building the base, which consists of several bits of wood, speaker, battery holder, electronics for motor, lights and sound, and some ballasted track as well as 3 rollers so that the main drive wheels can freely rotate when the train is mounted on the base. Overall, it's real high quality stuff and the sleepers are real wood. Surprisingly though, the ballast are just pieces of plastic, and they don't fit well at all. Of course, this is easily solved by just getting some 1/24 scale ballast and glueing that on, but that's something I can do later on :)
I've decided to paint the locomotives rather than keep it just brass (either raw or polished, even though polished looks really good as well), which of course adds some complexity. I need to plan ahead to make sure I pre-paint all the parts that are hard or impossible to get to later on. I'm not going to weather it, but paint it as if it were a fully restored museum piece.
Looking at pictures though, there seem to have been multiple varieties of C62-2 paint schemes. In some pictures the drive rods are just metal, which in others they're partially painted red. Often it has the white stripe running the length of the train, but sometimes it doesn't. Also, the deflectors are sometimes trimmed with a copper colored strip, but that's not something I see in many pictures (even though it looks really good :)).
Some examples:
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http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ファイル:JRW-C622-SteamLoco.jpg has red drive rods, white stripe and copper deflector trims
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http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ファイル:JRN-C62-SteamLoco.jpg just has the white stripe
Does anyone have any idea if there's specific meanings to the various ways certain parts are painted? I'm leaning towards going with painted drive rods, white strip and copper trims, mainly because it breaks the black, and would definitely make such a large model look more interesting..
(As I'm at work right now, pictures will follow later ;))
