New Beginnings

 When I built the benchwork for the new railroad, I made several mistakes.

The basic framework is built of 1x2 dimensional lumber glued and screwed in an L shape to provide dimensional stability. It is fastened to an L channel, likewise made of 1x2 dimensional lumber, around the periphery of the room with legs at the critical junction points to keep everything flat and level. This has worked fairly well, but the mistakes soon followed.

At first I laid my 1/2 inch foam right on top of this framework. Of course it started to sag right away, I should have either used 1 inch foam, which is much more rigid, or used a plywood sub-surface. Fortunately I had not laid any track, so back to Big Orange I went.

This is where I made mistake number 2. Rather than use plywood I opted for 1/8 inch Masonite. In case you are not familiar with Masonite, it is a light flexible particle board type material, with the emphasis on flexible. It looked good initially, so I started laying out track.

It didn't take long before my track looked like a roller coaster. I tried shoring the track up with dimensional lumber underneath fastened to the framework, but had limited success. I though about installing more bracing from the underneath, but if I did so not only would I soon have way to much bracing, but said brace work would soon interfere with switch machines and wiring. To add to the toxic stew, anything that remained outside of the right-of-way would also undulate, which would make placing buildings (especially large ones) problematic.

And so this weekend I took all the track work up, peeled the foam from the Masonite, and pulled the Masonite from the framework. This included pulling all the feeder wiring out since it was zip tied to anchors fastened to the bottom side of the sub-surface. I then cut new 1/4 inch plywood and laid it atop the benchwork to flatten out.

Even though essentially I am starting all over, this has actually afforded me an opportunity to rethink part of what I am doing. For instance, the location of my coal washing plant doesn't leave enough room for the narrow gauge between the plant and the table edge. This was made necessary by the addition of a hill leading to the tunnel over the right loop, which was then followed by a larger hill up to the corner of the room where the peak was, followed by a long grade down the back side behind the main layout area.

The hill was made exclusively with Woodland Scenics risers to a 2 inch height at the peak. Through the tunnel the track was 1 inch above the surface. The up  grade started at the beginning of the curve to the turnaround section (defined as the part of the track immediately to the right of the town going all the way around to the left loop) and ended at the end of the straightaway behind the town. This hill limited my scenery potential behind the track work through town and added operational difficulties that I had not planned for.

With the restart I am now able to eliminate this hill (another mistake, I had not allowed room for any scenic work behind the risers, they were flat against the wall, which means they would have had nothing but sky behind them, which is not very prototypical) although I will allow for a slightly smaller rise (about a half inch) through the tunnel loop and along the wall behind the coal plant. This time I will leave room for scenery behind the risers, I won't have a further grade behind the coal plant, and it will drop much more quickly behind the town instead of taking up the full length which will allow for more scenery through town.

This in turn will allow me to move the coal plant back from the edge another 3-4 inches, which will allow plenty of room for the narrow gauge. I am changing up the standard gauge track work to join the coal plant siding back to the main just before the return loop curve, which will allow room to put a passenger station to serve the narrow gauge end-of-line, which will once again end in a turntable.

I am going to let the newly-cut plywood relax for a week, and next weekend I will apply a coat of paint and nail it down. After that, the planning for the new track will begin. 

4-4-0 Conversion Redux

 It has been a while since I have visited this topic. In my last post on the subject the body and tender had been completed and sent out for paint. To make a long story short, they never got painted and returned, so as a result I have had the conversion hardware in a box for the past 7 years or so.

 Recently I got another chance to perform this conversion, on a completely different locomotive. Since the last time I have learned some new tricks as far as the tender wheels are concerned, which was actually going to be the next topic on this subject.

I will be restarting the entire series as I am performing the conversion from the start, so unlike my last post on the subject there will be pictures this time. This post will not be a part of that series insofar as doing the actual conversion, it is more of a "more to come" sort of post for those who were interested in converting a locomotive of their very own. 

The normal method of completing the Nn3 conversion on a Bachmann 4-4-0 tender is to file and carve the constituent pieces of the existing tender trucks to narrow them to 6.5 mm gauge. However, anyone familiar with the Bachmann 4-4-0 knows that the weak point in the entire mechanism is, in fact, the tender trucks, and narrowing them doesn't improve them a single bit.

To put it bluntly, the tender trucks are mechanisms of pain and sorrow, created by evil hell-spawn out of suck and fail for the sole purpose of causing tears and sadness. To say they suck is to bring grave insult to vacuum itself. I am certain that some engineer who worked for Bachmann long long ago secretly hated N scale and wanted to see it fail, and this was his contribution.

The problem is they are not free rolling in any sense of the word. Sure, you can get the wheels to move on their poop-metal stub axles, but they don't free wheel, even after liberal applications of Conduct-A-Lube oil, and they cause so much drag that the locomotive can't usually even pull the cars in the train sets they came in. They sit on the tracks with their drivers spinning helplessly as the train sits like a stone or moves so slowly that it is barely moving at all. In spite of their traction tires, the drivers flail about, causing only violent vibrations to the locomotive body until it finally flings itself off the tracks in disgust. 2 to 3 cars is about all you can expect if you are lucky, and all of this misery is due to the horrid tender trucks.

Fortunately for us Nn3'ers, in the past seven years there is a newcomer to the Z scale scene, and their name is Rokuhan. What has that got to do with this? Simply put, they have created all-wheel pickup bogies (trucks to those of us in the US) that have the same sort of needle-point side frames as used on the Kato Mikado as well as the newer Bachmann steam locomotives. (See Bachmann? We know you can do better!)

These trucks are readily available by buying their SA003-1 non-powered type A trailer. This link goes to Z Track Center, which is where I found them for $15.75 plus shipping, and I have found that to be about the cheapest place to get them.

Note that there is also a powered chassis, which may be useful for other things. There are also knuckle couplers if you prefer to use them rather than installing body mounted Micro Trains couplers, which may be a bit easier for the 4-4-0 conversion. I already had the Micro Trains coupler installed, but the installation of the Rokuhan bogies raised the tender body up enough that I had to shim the coupler to put it at the right height. More on that in a bit.

These bogies can easily be modified to put pickups on Republic Locomotive Works Nn3 kit locos (if you can find them; an appeal to Monroe Models is in order here), and better yet, they will work on the Bachmann conversion. The side frames have to be sanded off so that side frames from the original Bachmann or Micro Trains arch bar trucks can be glued on, or you may be able to find 3D files that uses the contact plates and wheel sets; I know they exist. 

I have been working on a proof of concept on my sole remaining Nn3 4-4-0 and I have to say the results are promising. I just had it orbiting a 195mm radius circle of track with 7 EBT freight cars made from RLW kits (which are quite heavy for their size) and a narrowed Bachmann old-time combine, a task which usually left the poor loco spinning it's wheels.

As I mentioned, the truck replacement causes the tender body to sit up a bit more than the stock trucks, which means the locomotive chassis has to be filed a bit to keep the rear drivers seated securely on the rails. This also means the driveshaft is angled downwards from the tender to the locomotive, but this hasn't so far caused a problem even with the thick clunky driveshaft on my present model. If you are using the new and improves mechanism with the narrow driveshafts, this should be even less of the non-problem that I am having with mine (by the way, this new series will be based on the newer chassis, so there will be pictures of that).

All in all I'm excited to get started. Stay tuned!