About that 4-6-0

 

A while back I mentioned an AristoCraft (New One) 4-6-0 I'd considered to pull my Selley passenger train, when the day arrived to need it.  Well, the Selley passenger cars are still in kit form, in their boxes, awaiting their turn on the workbench.  But another reason emerged for needing this engine, and one that's more apropos.

While searching for that elusive (and now suddenly everywhere!) New One "Supply Car", I ended up with a whole train of New One cars, nearly ready-to-run.  It's a long story, and might find its way onto this blog someday.  For now, suffice it to say that I've got a five-car "Open Enders" (New One's name for its cars) passenger train with one of each type plus an extra coach.

That brings us back to the 4-6-0.  The poor old gal had a broken tender truck, a broken drawbar spring, and two broken main rods.  After some cogitation I figured I could repair that truck, ditto the spring, and begin hunting for replacement main rods - more on that in a moment.  I managed to "weld" the truck back together with the same two-part metal epoxy I had used on the frame of the 2-8-0 kit-mingle.  I bent a new spring for the drawbar and soldered it in place.

With those repairs the thing should have run, and it did, briefly.  After cleaning the wheel treads and oiling the motor bearings the performance improved but not by much.  So I turned to what any reasonably skilled modeler would have done back in the day; I bought pickup shoes from Tomar and installed one under the loco.  I try to follow the troubleshooter's creed of "fix one thing at a time - then test - then repeat as necessary"*

With that solitary change and more wheel cleaning the thing now runs reasonably well.  Well enough, in fact, to pull the New One cars around Pine Branch Park without much difficulty.  Of course it still needs those main rods and I may have the solution.  Finding original parts will be less likely than a close-enough replacement, so I selected a pair of rods from an MDC 4-4-2.  As you can see from the photos they're pretty close.  Crucially, they're longer and I can drill a new hole (hopefully) in the beam and make it work.  Fingers crossed.

*I don't know if that really is a troubleshooter's creed, it just sounds like it could be.  Please don't come after me, members of the troubleshooter's guild.  If there is such an organization.  I'm just guessing.

A Selley Baggage Car?

For those not in the know about vintage HO scale rolling stock, Selley was one of the early manufacturers offering a set of short passenger cars.  These were kits with metal parts including the roof, truck frames, end platforms, really everything except the wood block floor and some clear acetate for window glass.  Producing cast metal detail parts beginning in 1941, the company made a small number of freight car kits but a wide variety of freight car parts including doors, sills, underframes, etc.  The coach and combine made their debuts, respectively, in February and March of 1960.

I fell in love with the combine at a train show in Ohio, buying the kit and bringing it home back at the turn of the century (is it too soon to use that phrase?).  Eventually I found another, and two coaches to match. However, that's all Selley ever made.  While other manufacturers added baggage cars, observations, parlors, etc. in their range of passenger offerings, Selley only ever made the combine and coach, marketing the combine as a complete one-car train.

These are short cars*; 6 inches long, an attribute that enables them to handle tight curves without that ugly overhang, according to the manufacturer.  So when I stumbled across a vintage metal kit for a baggage car with a similar length I was intrigued.  Who had made this?  It didn't take long to discover it was New One, a manufacturer from Japan.  These kits were similar to Selley's, only the roof was wood and the parts such as the end steps and railings were more crudely stamped metal instead of lovely detailed castings.

The New One car, or rather, "re-kit"** I bought is a real basket case.  It was missing the roof and one of the end steps and railings but no matter; those were parts I didn't need.  At first sight I immediately began forming in my mind a cunning plan to combine, pardon the pun, one of my Selley combines with these sides to make a "Selley" baggage car.  The big question was whether or not they would fit together. 

The Selley construction was different from other manufacturers' methods.  Instead of offering sides and ends and roof as separate parts or casting the body as one piece, they cast part of the roof with the sides, leaving the top bit above the clerestory windows to be attached.  So in order to fit the baggage sides to the Selley "roof", the lower roof parts will need to be cut away from the old Selley combine sides and added to the New One sides.  Then the length (width) of the New One sides will need to be reduced by just about an eighth of an inch on each end.  A real kitbashing challenge!

My Selley kits are still unbuilt but from time to time I take them out, inhale that glorious vintage kit aroma, and admire all the gleaming metal parts.  I'll add the New One baggage parts to the same box as the Selley kits.  For now that's where they'll live, but someday they'll get their day on the workbench and after that, time on the high iron conveying passengers - and their baggage - to their destinations.  Of course I'll need to rebuild my New One ten-wheeler to pull the whole lot...

*While the Selley cars are short, they're not "Sierra" cars, a moniker often assigned incorrectly to any short combine/coach pair that vaguely resembles the cars used on the Angels branch of the Sierra RR.  Those cars were much shorter and sagged noticeably.  The MDC Overton cars are shorter than the Selley cars; the Binkley shorty cars shorter still.  The Ulrich one-piece cars, another combine/coach pair, are about the same as the MDC, maybe a little shorter.  There were other metal side cars; New One, already mentioned above, and Alexander alongside Mantua.  However, much longer than that and we're leaving "shorty" territory and getting into the 50' and larger range.

 **One of my YouTube videos is about re-kitting a Wabash box car.  Sometimes it is best to crack that old glue, clean off the parts and rebuild the car.  This baggage car is one of those cases, though I'm going to re-kit the car before kit-mingling the parts with the Selley combine.  Re-kitting is just the first step.

Kit-Mingled 2-8-0 - Boiler Swap

Oh my poor Shifter.  This little 0-4-0 has been put off for over 12 years now through moves and shifting locales and all sorts of reasons.  I had claimed in my end-of-year goals that this time would be different and for sure I'd finish it by Christmas, but alas, it may not be so.  One thing I've learned about how I approach my hobby during lockdown is to follow the muse and pursue the passion even at the cost of delaying a project yet again.  Momentum is precious when the anchor of settled inertia takes so much effort to weigh.  Best to change tack and sail with the wind.

No, I'm not building a ship - lest the nautical references mislead you.  I'm swapping a boiler and cab to create a unique locomotive.  John Allen, of Gorre & Daphetid fame, was fond of heavily modifying locomotives to make them different from everyone else's.  I have always felt the same way.  The 2-6-0 I modified last year got a shortened tender and a high headlight; for fitting on a short turntable and to give the engine a 'family' appearance, respectively.  This time I'm applying a boiler and cab from an AristoCraft/New One 2-8-0 to the smooth running mechanism of an Athearn (nee MDC/Roundhouse) 2-8-0.  

The donor boiler is slightly longer than the original but offers a few features that make the conversion worth it for me.  Not visible in this image are the open cab doors on the front of the cab - a thing often seen in real life but rarely on the model, something I've always wanted to include on a model engine.  Like the 2-6-0, (and the Shifter) this engine has an auxiliary dome just in front of the cab and a side-mounted whistle (family likeness, again).  I also like the brass detailing already built-in and will be featuring that in the finished model.  

I'll be borrowing the backhead detail from the original boiler using Oyumaru thermoplastic and superfine Miliput to make a copy.  The great thing about this thermoplastic material is that the mold can be remade if it doesn't turn out well on the first try.  I was fortunate and got it right first time.  Here you can see two castings in Miliput.  I'll use the top one but it will need a little more Miliput to fill a couple imperfections.  It smooths easily with water.  The little side tabs will be cut away before it is installed.

I'll have to make a boiler segment for inside the cab along with a rudimentary floor and of course a place for a skinny engineer to sit.  The fireman may end up living on the deck behind the cab.  We'll see.  Brass for the bits to attach the new boiler to the old frame (or is that the other way around?) has already been cut and shaped, and I have all the detail parts I'll want to use.

More on this project as I hit new milestones.