Leaderboard

Hello in the summer heat I have always had a desire for a special locomotive for my layout. It all started when I read about the small port terminals in New York and the locomotives they were using. Central of New Jersey had an Ingersoll Rand locomotive that is one of the first commercially made diesel locomotives: A very beautiful locomotives in my opinion Then came Tim Warris with his Bronx Terminal in HO (an incredible layout). There he showed how to take a brass Boxcab and rebuild the drive to get it to run as well as it looks. The problem with just Boxcabs is that the only models that are available are either made of brass and costs a fortune, and runs like a bag of s**t. Or you may have to be be content with an old Roundhouse locomotives in plastic that is also going like muck ... Plus, you have to add the extra detailing to make it look reasonably good ..... Neither option was very good I thought it would be nice to build one myself. One problem was that it was really tricky to get hold of the drawings of the locomotive. Luckily, as I am a member on a U.S. forum, where one of the members have recently built an I-R Boxcab in brass and in S-scale. I emailed him about the drawings and he emailed me back everything he had as PDFs I had to resize it a bit before I got the printouts right for HO. After some thoughts and inquiries, I finally found a locomotive that would do as a chassis donor: (See http://www.rmweb.co....__1#entry410924) Apparently it is a bit of a difference in length. but very acceptable to me. I decided that I would build the new body in plastic, which could be a challenge. I used 1, 0.5 and 0.25 mm plasticard and some profiles. This is about everything you need for the basic construction (needle files and tweezers are not in the picture). I drew up the parts with an ink-pen and drilled the corners of the windows before I cut them out with an Xacto-knife. This is "the base wall" , made of 0.5 mm plastic On to it, the embossed outer skins of 0.25 mm plastic will be applied. That way I get good stability in the body and a "plate-like" appearance. The chassis was shortened 4 mm on one side, and the entire original decoder with lights sent into the round-archive . I made two boards to mount my LED's and resistors on. The Lenz decoder was hard wired in and mounted above the motor, but under the weight. I made a new base of 1 mm plastic. This is how it looked after I glued the walls to the base: I made the outer skins and the inner window frames of 0.25 mm plastic. The outer skins, I placed (upside down) on the drawing, and used a self-made light table to emboss all the rivets with a needle in a wooden holder. I can now reveal, that when you venture into this kind of construction, without having tested the techniques, it can REALLY go down the drains! The picture that follows shows just that: First, it did not work out with my roof, it was formed like a Banana..... Luckily I found a roof in the scrap box that could be cut to shape and be used instead. It was not the biggest problem ....... I had glued the body together and glued the window frames in place before applying the outer skins with the embossed rivets . It did not work out that way, so I started from scratch . But as I had done it once, it went rather quickly the second time ...... The Chassi beams are plasticard I-beams 2.5 mm. I had almost feared the construction of the roof mounted radiators .... Fortunately, I had a piece of corrugated patterned plasticard. I shaped a piece of 0.5 mm metal in the right curvature, then I took the plastic, forcing it to follow the shape of the plate and secured it with clamps and then dipped the whole shebang in boiling water for a few minutes. When it had cooled down I had a row of convincing cooling tubes in the right shape! So here is the build as it stands right now, just some paint and small details remain: The exhaust pipes on the roof is turned from beech in a drill stand Scratchbuilding is FUN! Source: The M-K & Eastern RR Harbour branch

Once a week, a meeting takes place at Farthing Station where staff and regular passengers engage in learned discussion about some of the great questions of our time... Link to Far Twittering & Oysterperch Link to the Wallace and Gromit layout

Over the last few months I've been working on a cunning plan to add interlocking to my lever frame. The frame itself is from the Shropshire and Herefordshire Area Group sold through the Scalefour stores. The frame is connected to a MERG CANACE3 circuit board so that each level generates a different event on the MERG CBUS. This means that the only thing coming out of the frame to the layout is the 12v and 0v power lines and the CANH and CANL data wires of the CAN bus. This has been fitted with a small modification in the form of a strip of nickel silver soldered into the bottom of each lever made from scrap from the etch. This 'tail' sticks out of the bottom of the frame. The locking is provided by means of a small servo under each lever which is fitted with a brass collar. The collar rotates to either lock the tail of the lever on one side or the other or present a slot through which the tail can pass. The servos are driven using MERG CANACC8 boards configured with the new CANServo8 code. Last in the box is a MERG CAN-USB board which allows the CBUS to talk to a PC. The PC runs the PanelPro from the open source JMRI project. Without going into too much detail (unless people want to know more) the levers are each defined as a 'Sensor', the turnouts on the layout and the servos which control the locks are defined as 'Turnouts'. I have set the CBUS boards on the layout which drive the points and signals to respond to the events direct from the lever frame so that I don't need to connect the PC. However when the PC is connected the 'Logix' programming in JMRI is configured so that each locking servo is set depending on the state of the levers. The great virtue of this system is that I can program all the locking on the PC and change it easily if (when?) I get it wrong. In practice so far I have got about half the locks working (there is some alignment work to do between the tails and locking rings) but have demonstrated I can make the distance signal only be released when the relevant home and starters are cleared. Also I can show that clearing the distance signal locks the homes and starters clear. In simple terms each lock has two conditional actions applied, one which unlocks the lever when A normal and B normal and C reversed etc. and a second which locks the lever when A reversed or B reversed or C normal etc. I could even get silly and add some train detection by track circuiting and then interlocking with that, or even only allow the starter to be cleared when I have a line clear from the box in advance.... or may implement locking that allows me to only pull the starter once per line clear.... This way madness lies. David

As promised I did a little video last night of the 72xx moving on Hinton Parva. It's not the best video ever and it is a little short, but it does show it moving. http://youtu.be/xWOIUcAB2Fo Later I had it doing circuits of the club test track, it was taking 10 minutes to do one circuit, I'm not sure of the size of the test track, but I think it is about 20 feet by 10 feet. Now all I need to do is finish it, there's that word again, "finish", I must look it up some time, something to do with Scandinavians I think Mark

BRILLIANT !!!!!!!!! .........looks just the thing , glad the info was of use Cheers John

Well, the 420s were produced from 1969 onwards. Initially, six batches were built, the last of which was completed in 1981. Various network extensions but required another two batches to be procured. These were treated to various technical improvements, such as the plug doors which replaced the sliding doors present on the first six batches. The 7th and 8th batch sets all date from between 1989 and 1997, and are still in rather good condition. They were also fitted with LED destination signs and a Railvox passenger information system after having been allocated to Stuttgart. At various points, 420s were also used in the Ruhr area, so for you to have seen them around Essen was not an uncommon occurrence.

That sounds like what Neil Andrews was demonstrating at the convention in Christchurch last year - I made one too Quite satisfying to do, but the floor ends up covered with little bits of green plastic coating from the wire. I didn't do the bark with flour and water though - do you have any pictures of a painted one to show how that comes out?

It looks bigger than I imagined in that last shot! How's she run - I've no experience of black beetles?