Friday, July 16, 2010

(Almost) Completed engine



So here it is: not a bad little engine, really. I did decide to leave the handrails in their raw brass form (and substituted brass wire to get the full effect), thinking that might be a good look for a well-kept turn-of-the-century express engine, but I'm not wholly satisfied by the look: it's a little toylike, I think. But the trailing truck worked out well. It required no modification; in fact, the engine ran much better with it than it did with the original truck, probably because that bar I thought I might have to replicate on the replacement truck shifted too much of the engine's weight onto the lead driver. I have to admit that I never counted on the simple possibility that the design might be bad, but it worked out well, and the engine is no longer slippery.

As initially built, it ran poorly - it shook, and the gears ground, so I disassembled the engine and removed the motor, gearbox and motor mount. Then I slipped a small piece of notebook paper, folded over, between the motor and the mount, and this cut the vibration and noise way down. Now it runs well, and creeps right along; at some point I have to paint and weather the motor mount, but I'll get to it in good time; for now, it's just nice to have it running.

A few other improvements: I'm going to replace the lead wheels with spoked wheels, which always add a certain period flair. The arch-bar trucks on the tender are going to go, too - I'm waiting on some PSC 4 wheel NYC-style fabricated Commonwealth trucks that look appropriate for passenger service, and I'm considering taking a mulligan on the tender paint job: I'm not totally happy with the decaled lining-out, although I do like the look. I have a spare MDC tender shell, and I periodically consider redoing it - although that might put me on the wrong side of the borderline between nitpicky and neurotic.

I also made some fairly small modifications to the boiler that greatly improve the look of the engine. First and foremost was the bell; Roundhouse engines generally come with an integrally-cast bell that has neither bracket nor hanger, and looks like a small pen cap sitting on the boiler. A good bolt-cutter will take it right off, and you can file the sprue flush. Once that was done, I bored out a hole where the sprue had been, and a very simple Cal-Scale bell and hanger assembly made a big difference. I also bored an .020" hole in the right side of the cast whistle, and fabricated an actuating arm out of a small piece of brass wire. Before I installed the cab, I bored .010" holes on either side of the backhead space, and ran two pieces of .010" brass wireout of them. Then I installed the cab, clipped the wire to length, and glued it to the bell assembly and the whistle actuating arm, taking care to put a very slight curve in both (a very tiny touch of ACC secures it nicely to the dome, retaining the curve). Then I used an 000 brush to paint the wire a slightly different shade of black, so that it stood out just a bit against the boiler. This was not hard to do, but it added some nice visual interest to the model. I bored a pair of holes in the smokebox ( the rivet pattern and the handrail lines allow you to space them correctly), installed some black-painted classification lights, and replaced the stock pilot truck wheels with some PSC 33" spoked wheels - which give a much more elegant front end, reminiscent of the early Western Pacific ten-wheelers.





Modeling the modern....

....is not generally something I care much about. I'm moved mostly by the things I see in museums, not Silverliners. And yet.....when I saw this website, I have to admit I felt a bit of a twinge. I've climbed on a Silverliner at 30th Street more times than I can count - and their dinginess always feels a few steps removed from the weary wooden coaches I love, or even the South Shore car I rode as a young boy, back in 1982, when they were just weeks way from the deadline.

And yet....seeing these, it's hard not to think of what you could do with them, and how they would look on a model of the Northeast Corridor.