Blog- On30runner's Blog - getting things moving

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of course at this point I only had the one locomotive. Add the fact that it only had a rear coupling on the tender and operation became a bit limited. It could only face and travel in one direction if it were to be able to do any shunting. I therefore had to get another loco to address these problems. As I was still fairly new to On30 I decided to get the ubiquitous Bachmann Porter 0-4-0 as the next loco. This was mainly because it was small, allegedly ran well, and was also very cheap (a critical factor in student layout building!). I ordered one from the USA and while waiting for it to arrive I set to and weathered the mogul.

 

This was done mostly with acrylics, and it turned out rather well I think. It was copied from a picture of a D&RGW 2-8-0 C-16 and this helped a lot in getting the loco to look authentic. Some real coal in the tender and already the model looked considerably less like it was from a train set!

 

The Porter arrived, and was put to work before I weathered it, so I could see what it was like. For someone used to the high speed antics of Hornby 0-4-0s, this one was a totally new breed. It ran slowly (very slowly, I once timed a two minute circuit of the layout as a test) and pick up was good. However after a while the loco began to stutter and no amount of cleaning would get its awesome running back again. I took it to bits and discovered the keep plate on the bottom had some nibs bearing on the axles. This was keeping it all too rigid which meant on rough track a wheel would lift off the rail head and the loco would stall. I therefore filed some material off them. This is shown in the second photo and the result was a more floppy chassis which wouldn't lift off the railhead due to the extra vertical play I had put in.

 

That done the loco had its bufferbeams painted red and the loco weathered and numbered. As it was the first loco of my own fictitious company it was of course going to be number 1.

 

thats all for now really. Please note the pictures of the locos were taken only a moment ago so the layout you see them on is a bit more developed than it was then!

 

cheers!

 

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