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Hornby Pendolino Re-Motoring


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Hi everybody.  Has anyone on here attempted to re-motor a Pendolino with a suitable 4 axle twin bogie central driven motor unit and if so what did you use for the donor motor?

 

If not, has anyone any idea what might do the job from a bogie wheelbase and wheel size perspective?  I have done the Heljan 26/276/33 into an Hornby APT which went OK but this was already well documented.

 

Thanks

 

DIxie

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Will be interesting to see if anything comes from this. Ive recently changed the motor on my pendolino (like for like) and with Hornby's own decoder they run poorly. I fitted LaisDCC decoder into it(had to hard wire) and it runs a hell of a lot smoother now. Just the squeeling pickups to sort.

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Thanks for replying CazRail.  The one I have is not DCC at the moment, although I have a sound chip for it already, I will need to convert it.  My layout has a 1:24 to 1:36 gradients all the way up from the valley level to the mountain pass.  I really need to convert it to DCC and give it a trial run.  Most of my other locos have centre motors driving both bogies, including the Hornby APT I converted.  All of these go up the slope fine.  If the Pendolino goes up no problem I might not convert it, we will have to wait and see.  I understand that Olivias add an extra motor to the dummy end which gives it more umph.  Using the Heljan 26/7/33 chassis is a well known work around for the APT, and the only alterations are to lengthen the drive shafts.  Unfortunately no-one appears to have done the Pendolino yet, so I may be going into uncharted territory.

 

So I would be grateful to hear from anyone who could point me towards a suitable donor chassis.

Edited by Dixie Dean
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How does the original Bachmann 158 chassis match up. I know some people used to put it under a Mk3 coach to re power HSTs in the days before the super detail one came out and I've also seen one in a 442 EMU.

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Thanks for the suggestion @giz.   With the APT I had to remove the centre of each bogies and glue the Heljan drive units in.  As a result, the bogies still resembled the APT bogies, looks wise, but inside was a new drive unit.  So I presume the 158 bogies do not resemble a Pendolino bogie?  And if that is the case that I will have to insert the Class 158 drive units into the centre of the Pendolino bogies if that was to work?

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  • 5 months later...

After advice from another club member I've just fitted a second drive bogie into the lead coach of my Hornby Pendolino. That will give us two full length Pendolinos to run on our club layout. My single motor bogie Pendolino could run a 9 coach train but not in both directions ( I think I remember it was okay pulling). The other issue we had was because of the rubber tyres; accelerating hard would make the motor bogie 'wheelie' so could derail on points and curves but we get around that by simply not giving the train all of the power in one go!

 

Fitting a second drive bogie does require having a spare drive bogie and preferably a complete second motor end chassis to cut up. Seems that might be a bit expensive looking at ebay right now.

 

 

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