The 8th anniversary of my layout is coming up any day now and the scenic work is not much nearer to being finished than it was two years ago. I have added a second signal box that the original plan required and I have a phone booth and two pillar boxes to install.

Modifications have been under way on the frequently mentioned Wrenn City Class loco. At one time it seemed that it was about ready, the only thing left being to add a coupling to the tender, the original one having been removed. I have a habit at times to remove locomotives from the track and leave them parked between tracks. S, one day I left my CC40101 parked in that way and set the City Class running. It came round at a good speed and bashed straight into the parked locomotive, making a mess of the piston rods and con rods on one side, one rod having come out of the cylinder block unit.

Now my physical limitations, i.e. arthritic fingers, finger tips so smooth that they expel things instead of holding them, not the best of eyesight and the lack of suitable tools meant that removing crank pins and con rods was not on and I went for the more risky route of removing the cylinder block by drilling out the two rivets holding in place.

Then the problem was how to fit the three loose rods on either side into their respective holed in the cylinder, particularly since only one rod is fixed and the other two are articulated and could both point upwards, point downwards or one up and the other down. I had no good way of holding the cylinder block and two hands were not enough. I than had the bright idea of using magnets to keep the rods in place and, since I had two loose ones available, I put them to work and, at the second attempt had all the rods in their right places.

Subsequently I set about refitting the decoder, which I had removed to prevent any accidental damage (it is Zimo which are not cheap) and then saw that one end of the pickup wire was not touching the corresponding wheel. I removed it, then thought that the lead attached to it was a bit short for soldering to the decoder lead and replaced it. Then I thought that the new one was too thick and, on removing it I somehow managed to cur the pickup wire in two. Fortunately I found a Wrenn spares supplier via the Internet and got a new pickup wire and a replacement drawbar (the original had gone astray in the early attempts at dismantling the loco). I installed the new pickup wire, decoder and drawbar and tested the loco. It worked, so I replaced the body and it still worked.

The next thing was to try the loco out with the tender and this is where the trouble started. The tender derailed at several points and one obvious point was where I had replaced the track after the accident. It was a stretch of four sections with a curve. At first it appeared to be irregularities in the track that caused derailment so I replaced the four sections with one portion of flexi track. However, the tender still derailed at this point. It was becoming obvious that the problem did not lie with the track, but with the rolling stock. On the layout I could not see clearly what was happening, since it was on the inside of the curve, so I got hold of the section of track I had removed and placed it so that I could see the inside of the curve clearly and discovered that the drawbar plate assembly was diving under the loco body and causing the rear end of the tender to lift and then derail. So, after checking that the drawbar was correctly installed, I removed the plate assembly and ground off the rather square shoulders into a triangular shape. Once reassembled and coupled to the loco, it seemed that the problem was solved, but another hitch appeared. There is one particular part of the track where the tender derails, both when attached to the engine and when pushed along alone. It would appear that a joint in the rails is causing the problem, but I can't quite see why. I have posed a question on the Forum.