The key to performing an adequate test of any system is to make sure that each component of the system works correctly. You must begin your testing from the ground up, working each part separately before testing the system as a whole.

This is a rule I have yet to take to heart so that it’s second nature. Oh, the gray hairs I could have saved!

I pulled the power truck out of my second-hand Mantua F9 diesel locomotive and applied power from a 9v battery. It seemed to run okay. I soldered the leads from the motor to a Radio Shack 9v battery cap and tested that. It seemed to run okay. Rough, but okay. I wired a whopping big switch into the circuit so that I could turn the thing on and off. It was fidgety, but worked okay when it worked. Not great, mind you, but okay. I crammed  the battery and the switch into the B unit, held it all in place with the weight that came with the B unit, rewired the leads from the A unit so that they passed through two sets of holes drilled in the ends of the locomotives and flipped the switch. It was still fidgety, but when it ran it ran okay. Then I flipped the whole shebang over and dropped it on the test track. No go. Wiggle wiggle, fidget fidget, wiggle wiggle. No go. Back on the shelf with you, you miserable piece of junk!

Sunday I looked at it again, unable to believe that the system would work on its back but not on its wheels, and took it all apart. That’s when I found my mistake: the power truck was wheel-bound. I could get it to run, but only grudgingly, as if there was a buildup of sludge on the axles. Mounted right-side up in the vise, pinioned by the mounting tabs so that the wheels could turn freely, the little guy ran smoother with a quick dosing of WD40 on the axles. I ran it similarly about two weeks ago but without lubrication, expecting the application of power to break up the gunk. Now it runs good. Better than good…gooder?

But, rather than reassemble the entire system, which is useless in any case as the locomotive will be remote controlled once I get the proper radio setup, it seemed to make sense to just run the locomotive with the 9v battery. A petrochemical restraining device (rubber band) held the battery to the roof of the F9, while power leads stretched from the top of the power truck, now mounted in the body shell, out through the after port holes and were cap-nutted to the Radio Shack battery clip. Boom…ran great, off to the test track.

If you’ve ready anything about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Cern, Switzerland, you’ll know that it’s the largest thing ever built by human beings. It’s the largest building, the largest laboratory, the largest experiment, the heaviest thing ever assembled by mankind. With its test chamber a chilly three degrees below absolute zero, it is also the coldest spot in the known universe. The irony is that all that mammoth sized stuff is required to be able to split quarks, the absolutely smallest known things in the universe. The LHC is a pinnacle of human achievement, built by tens of thousands of specialists and scientists to incredibly intensely accurate standards.

My test track is 12 pieces of curved and 2 straight pieces of plastic snap-track that came with the New Ray locomotive.

When they throw the switch on the LHC, tens of thousands of electromagnets perform flawlessly in directing the paths of sub-atomic particles directly into the center of an electron-microscopically scanned target.

When I put my battery powered Tyco/Mantua General Motors F9 diesel locomotive on my New Ray test track, it trundles down the straight section, but one of the wheels gets caught on the edge of the first curved piece. It lurches around the first curved piece, but is derailed on the second, causing the third piece of snap-track to become unsnapped. The locomotive drags itself down the ties of the second section and falls into the gap between the second and third, lying down on its side. And the motor quits. Everything still seems to be connected correctly, but there is no go.

So, back to the drawing board. I’m sure those guys in Switzerland built that LHC so danged big so that their electron beam wouldn’t fall off the test track and stop working.

There’s a maxim for we system testers: your test results will only be as good as your test preparations. Hmph. I wish I’d learned that one before I started on this project!

Getting my Tyco/Mantua F9 converted over to a 9 volt battery operation system should be a piece of cake. Should be.

The thing is designed to run on 12v of DC. But that 12 volts comes as flat out full speed…something that isn’t going to happen on the Paris to Peking HO Scale Garden Railroad. No sir, not with those turns. In addition, I’m hoping to install some degree of remote control in the locomotive, which means we’ll be running a range of voltages, but none so high as 12 volts.  So, a 9 volt battery should work great. And it does. Sort of.

The problem is I bought this little locomotive, a handsome fellow in the Santa Fe War Bonnet scheme, from a fellow who said “it might work.” That might can be a mighty slippery word. However, I can’t really complain; he sold me three feet of nickel silver flex track, the locomotive and a matching B unit for eleven bucks!

Popping the motor truck out of the body shell was a piece of cake: it’s held in by a metal tab on either side. All you need to do is spread the sides of the shell and it comes right out.

I tested the motor by placing leads from my LGB power pack directly on the motor contacts. It runs grindingly, but it runs. It runs even more grindingly in reverse. I let it run for a good ten minutes at around seven volts, hoping to burn out the cobwebs and dried stuff in the gears. Now it runs much better.

The goal at this point is to get the locomotive to run continuously around my little test track…I have an oval of HO scale track from the New Ray construction set that will work just great. That’s all I want…just to satisfy myself that the 9 volt battery will provide enough power for this guy to run for, say, half an hour all by himself.

But you can see massive amounts of solder on the contacts in the picture…that’s the challenge. This little fella isn’t quite factory-fresh, if you catch my drift. Wiring a Radio Shack 9volt battery clip through a hefty switch from my parts drawer yielded a nice little test system that should do the trick. Flip the switch, the motor runs. Flip it again, the motor doesn’t run. What could be simpler?

It works great when the locomotive is on its back. The battery and switch hide inside the B unit, which is hardwired to the A unit. But once the assembly is flipped over, the motor shuts off. GRRRRRRR!

That’s just one challenge. I tried moving the paired units around the curve of my New Ray track using my 5-0-0 pusher unit (the one God put at the end of my arm), and found that the radius of the turn is too tight! Talk about frustrating!

So, now to clean up the contacts and oil the crackers out of the power truck and figure out why it only runs inverted and figure a way to mount the 9v battery on the A unit…this was supposed to be easy!

You know how when women, most often famous women, get a little older they go see the plastic surgeon and have their skin pulled like cellophane over their faces so that they give the illusion of looking younger, but their hands still look like prunes because there isn’t a surgeon out there who’s figured out how you can pull the skin over your hands super tight and yet still be able to use them? These women walk around with this look of eternal surprise on their faces because the skin’s all pulled up super tight. Lovely. Anyway, they call that “having some work done.”

Well, I decided it was time to “have some work done” on the New Ray locomotive…you know, that shiny little plastic jobber that came with my 8 year old daughter’s construction set? Sure it’s plastic, sure it’s cheap, but, actually, once you get to looking at it, the detail’s not that bad.

I washed it in warm soapy water before I performed surgery…what little bit I performed! Despite having been pawed by five, six, seven, and eight year old little hands, plus those grubby mitts belonging to her father, the locomotive was surprisingly clean.

So, to surgery, doctor. Now, knowing as we do that this little guy was probably $2.98 on day one, you can be sure it won’t carry the detail of a Bachmann Spectrum or even an Atlas locomotive. But in simply drybrushing acrylic paint on it, an impressive number of details popped out. There are nice raised panel lines, deeply scribed grilles, and latches on every door.

It is really a rather nice little model. There are interesting “lights” molded onto a pair of towers rising fore and aft of the cab…interesting because the molding makes them look like they might have been orange “twirly lights” like on the top of your MOW pickup truck. The external-rod driving system really, really works. And the cab has a floor! Sure, it’s a little high, rather up to the driver’s waist, but, hey, who looks at shoes anyway? With the AAA battery installed it buzzes down the track like a grumpy little bee; not fast, but steady and purposefully. It’s pretty cool

The absence of a coupler on the long-hood end indicates it was meant to be run long-hood forward, so, when I glued my engineer into the cab, I stuck him so that he faces out over the long hood. I put clear plastic glass in each window, using Gorilla brand Super Glue…when I was younger I had surgeon-steady hands. No more, my friend, no more. So, yes, I splopped a wee bit of Super Glue on my clear windows. What do you know about clear plastic and Super Glue? That’s what I remembered, too. But it didn’t happen with the Gorilla formula, which makes me suspect that, although it smells like CA, it must have something else in it.

I added hand rails to either side of the long hood using 18 gauge wire. I drilled a little hole in the leading corner of the deck on each side and used that to anchor the forward post. The center post is quite the cheat; I drilled a hole in the deck, stuck the wire up through the hole, and anchored it to the rail with Super Glue. It worked! In looking at it now, of course, I see that my placement of the railing makes it impossible for the engineer to go forward of the cab without climbing over it! Eh, leave it to the yard maintenance guys anyway.

After several washes in successive floods of black, brown, and light gray acrylic paints, the details popped right out. The silver stripe looked hokey to me, so I painted over it with black…now it looks businesslike. It’s just a little switcher, and flyweight at that. Still, I can hardly wait to see it running down the rails at the head of a freight…well, only a couple of cars because of that AAA power source, and, well, I don’t have any rails yet…but you get the idea!

“Here, now, I tole ye I’d find it,” the Chief Engineer says proudly.

“No one said you wouldn’t,” the CEO sniffs.

“Well, I did,” the CFO says quietly.

“After all,” the PR Guy says, “it did take you an awfully long time.”

“Ye dunna ken to how difficult these things are, lad,” the Chief Engineer is uncharacteristically nice this evening. He’s only on his second stout.

I figured the short would be in the electronics in the nose of the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler, as when my brother and I installed the radio from the Ferrari we didn’t have a working soldering iron or any electrical tape. So we used the old twisty-wire, masking tape combo and hoped for the best. You’re not talking high voltage coming out of half a dozen D cells, so masking tape is kinda okay.

So, the plan for the day was to try out the new Weller Soldering Gun on the Bachmann and FIX THAT SHORT! Ah, the best laid plans, eh?

Now, I remember that saying as: the best laid plans are aft gang aglay…and I think we can attribute it to Robert Burns…no, not George Burns. Say goodnight, Gracie. I think that’s the quote…looking it up now because I’m curious. No, it wasn’t George, it was Robert, written in 1785, and here’s the quote: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men/Gang aft agley”. It’s from a poem he wrote called To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With the Plough. Now you know something you didn’t now before, unless you already knew that, in which case I’ll go on with the story about the Bachmann.

The nose of the NSBH is just too cramped to allow soldered joints in the wires…everything has to bend in order to fit, and I rather fear the connections will break, as, from what I’ve seen, soldered joints aren’t all that flexible. Enter Wire Nuts. These guys hang on tightly, protect against cross-connection, and just plain look cool. So I replaced all of the twisted wire/masking tape combo joins with Wire Nuts. And it looks cool!

Once I  put the thing back together I discovered, much to my horror, that the short still prevailed. She ran fine until it hit a bump, and trust me, on the Paris-to-Peking Railway you can’t go more than six inches without hitting a bump, and then she’d stop. What in heavens name?

Off came the body shell…now, on the battery-driven Bachmann Big Hauler, the aft end of the boiler has this massive snap-on door that closes the battery compartment…the batteries are stored in the boiler. This is one massive piece of plastic, and Hercules himself has been known to complain about how hard it is to get that door open.

“I have?” Hercules says from Mt. Olympus.

“Shhh, it’s just a figure of speech. It’s those mortals,” Zeus says.

The battery door is firmly attached to the body shell, not the chassis, of the NSBH. With the body shell off, there is no way to test the electricals, as that door provides the cross-connection between the battery sets. Got it? So the way to test your electricals is with a knife, making the cross-connection yourself. I did that, and, wonder of wonders, the thing ran! And I couldn’t stop it from running until I removed the knife.

Picture Edison in his early years, before he invented the electric light bulb. What popped in above his head when he had an idea? A match? A lantern? Maybe a phonograph.

Here’s the source of the short: it aint no short. There are two little screws that hold the body shell onto the chassis. Somebody put tanks on the sides of the body shell in just the right place to occlude those screws…in other words, you can’t screw the body to the chassis. As the boiler door, which provides cross-connection, is attached to the body shell, any bump causes the body to vibrate away from the chassis, and, bzzzt, no connection. There’s your short, Napoleon! Or is it; There, you’re short, Napoleon…sorry, I’m in a weird mood.

So, I screwed the body on with a nasty looking screw in the aft end, where all nasty screws should take place, and, voila, she runs like the dickens! However it is that the dickens runs…don’t have time to look that one up.

“Here, lad,” slurs the Chief Engineer, “ye’re aft gang agley!”

“Well,” the PR Guy says, “be that as it may, it makes a much better story than ‘Garden Railway Chief Engineer Says Oh, I Get It’!”

“What baffles me is why ye still have a job!” The Chief Engineer goes back to his stout.

The Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler ran great, forwards and backwards (unlike the locomotive in Polar Express that could be driven from side to side…it’s not a question of how they did it, but why you would need that in a locomotive). The NSBH responded nicely to the radio control. It was, in a word, cool.

And then, one fine winter’s day, it quit working. Well, those six D cells have been in there for a long, long time. Fresh Duracells (bing, bing BING) produced exactly the same result: nothin’. Well, that 9 volt sucker in the transmitter has been in there for a long, long time.  A fresh Duracell 9-volt (bing, bing BING) produced exactly the same result: still nothin’.The little headlight turned on and off only sporadically when commanded from the remote. Hmmm, something’s fishy. What IS it?

“Ye’ve got a short, y’idiot!” bellows the Chief Engineer. As if I didn’t know that.

Well, that was a fine winter’s day about a week ago. I decided to back-burner the thing because some other tragedy had befallen the household…I believe it was the Dreaded Event. Then came the rains, and the puttin’ up of the hardware before the storm of the century.

Just for giggles and grins, I snapped on the transmitter and pushed the throttle.

Now, you have to understand, I’ve spray-painted the crackers out of this locomotive. I’ve been trying to eliminate the Bachmann Big Hauler look from it, with all those gaily painted wheels and stuff, and I’ve blasted it pretty heavily with Rust-Oleum. Brown was the first color of choice. Then I nailed it with black to make the various new bits and pieces look merged together.  I haven’t quite gotten around to cleaning up the running gear on it yet, so when it runs, it has a lot of Rust-Oleum-Resistance to overcome.

But, it ran. Sure, it groaned and squeaked, but it ran! The headlight blinked on and off relative to commands from the remote. The thing trundled down the track toward the Kazakhstani Bridge, pushing the Troublesome Trucks before it. It came back…

Well, it came part of the way back. It got next to the cypress tree and decided to not run anymore. I thought perhaps we’d burned out the radio…it was designed to be powered by two AA’s, not six D’s.  But the light still responded to my commands (radio, not verbal).

And then there was a cool wind with a hint of moisture in it, and I knew I had to move my tail to get the thing out of the elements. I switched the batteries off in the locomotive, verified by the light no longer responding to the remote control, and parked ‘er in the train cabinet (the one I carelessly built over the outlet that houses both black widows and the GFI button).

Strange, huh? Dr. Voltmeter will have to take a look at our continuity when the rain lets up.

“Now, that dunna make no sense at all,” the Chief Engineer mutters.

Yes, you read right, my friend. If you saw the earlier post called Tough Times you’ll know that the Bachmann N-S-B-H took a dive from about three feet and landed with a horrific CRAACK on the concrete walkway. After picking ‘er up and checking things out I found no major physical damage, but the motor, she no work. Headlight works. Motor: nope.

I don’t mind telling you I was a trifle dispirited by that turn of events.  Here I hadn’t even finished the tank modification and I’d already blown up the radio.
But this weekend I decided to take the bull by the tail and face the situation.

With my trusty GE multimeter in hand I tackled the beast, trying to figure out what went wrong.  It turns out the problem had to do with the battery door …if you’ve ever seen the battery door on the Bachmann Big Hauler you’d be amazed at how robust that thing is. The batteries, six D cells, are stored in the boiler, so the battery door is actually the back end of the boiler itself. It has thick lugs that look like they were adapted from a submarine hatch that hold it in place.  Anyway, one of those broke off. Actually, it didn’t so much break off as the cement joint broke and it popped off. Two-part, five-minute epoxy put that sucker back on. All fixed!

So, whilst I was at that fixing thing, I decided to finish the modification…I know, that seems radical, but I decided what the hey: it’s taken long enough already. The grating over the top of the tanks is made from plastic canvas (stolen from my wife’s sewing basket…shhh, don’t tell!) and is glued down with more of the five-minute epoxy. I made the little hatches out of sheet styrene and stuck ‘em down with CA glue.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: you stuck the details onto a pre-painted piece of plastic? Are you nuts? You know that you can’t use acrylic glue on painted surfaces because the glue sticks to the paint, not the surface.

Well, the plastic canvas is made of polyethylene, which, as you know,  is the slickest, bendable-est, most difficult plastic to work with on the planet. Here’s what I did; I laid down a thick sheet of epoxy goo on top of the tanks, and then seated the canvas in it so that the epoxy gushed through some of the holes in it. This, when dry, rather locked the canvas into the epoxy. Then I sprayed the crackers out of it with black Rust-Oleum. The CA glue I used is a gel, and, like the epoxy, reached through the coruscations (it’s a word: look it up) in the canvas. The paint eliminated the slickness of the plastic whilst the gel anchored around the canvas. This is brilliant, if I must say so myself, and I must, for certainly no one else will say it.

Now, don’t be put off by that groovy purple paint. I just wanted to see what she’d look like with a black boiler nose and running gear and a colored everything else. The purple part of the loco will be either Chinese red or that rich chocolate-pudding brown we started with. Pretty cool, huh?

Here’s the kicker: IT WORKS!!!!

It seems Old Bessie the Desktop Behemoth has picked up a bit of a bug…darn thing won’t boot up without incessantly running CHKDSK after starting Windows. It was annoying the first time, frustrating the second, and INFURIATING!!! the third!

Well, I’ve shown Old Bessie! While my Windows OS disk spins merrily away in the E drive I’m sitting next to the heater with my wee little Blackberry, typing away as happily as you please! Hey, Bessie! CHK this DSK!

But that’s not the point of this post…nosiree Bob! Just looka those pics and tell me what ya’all see!

Those, my friend, are tanks…nice, rectangular tanks, carrying water and fuel oil and perhaps oolong tea…

Dang! I just “repaired” the Windows installation, and now it wants to boot up again! Grrrrrr….stupid Windows! Sure it works great for, like, 99.9% of the time, but I’m sleepy, I want to get this done, and, frankly, I’ve gotten a better offer! Well, we’ll just reload old Mr. Windows on Old Bessie and see who checks who’s disk!

So, take a guess as to what material your skin-flinty Mr. Turner used for those tanks…take a good look and you’ll see it…Cassette case? Nope, too small. CD crystal case? Nope, too thin…tick, tick, tick…BZZZZT! The correct answer: video cassettes!

Video cassettes are made out a nice, heavy plastic that, when taken apart, exactly match the depth required on the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler. Not only that, but they’re big enough that you can cut opposing sides of each tank from the same cassette. Better yet, you can reasonably eliminate a video tape you’d rather not have your kids see…ahem.

The left side tank came from a video of stupid stuff I shot 20 years ago when I thought I was a hotshot videographer. Talk about embarrassing footage! The right side tank is an annoying Veggie Tales video that was bad in 1992. The “edited” video cassettes make a nice, trim little tanky-looking package, don’t they?

Hot Dog! Back on the PC again…I opened Windows in Safe Mode and ran System Restore. Whatever I loaded, and I think it was, of all the things, updated software for the Blackberry…ah, insidious technologies!…must have tangled up the Windows OS. It’s better now!

Anyway, I unscrewed the video cassettes and broke them into two halves, and then cut the proper profile out of opposing corners of each half. By rotating the corners and gluing them together, I was able to acquire nice, smooth(ish), industrial-looking tanks.

They are glued to the sides of the locomotive body…no, they’re not as heavy as blocks of wood, but they’re plenty secure.  A quick coat of black Rust-Oleum, and, voila, tanks!

Now we have a radio controlled, short wheelbase, European profile 4-4-0 tank locomotive! The only problem now is that the coupler on the back end of the Bachmann is really just a big ugly hook. And the darn thing is so close to the locomotive’s frame that it really cinches the following car up tight! Have to work on that!

“What’s this about a spy?” gags the CEO on his brandy, “in our midst?”

“Yes,” the PR Guy shouts, “a SPY in our yards! Just look at these scandalous photos!”

“I’ve seen better,” mutters the Chief Engineer.

“Well, now, I say, that’s the Bachmann Big Hauler, isn’t it?” asks the CEO.

“Not so bloody big-hauler,” say s the Chief Engineer.

“Yes, yes it is,” stammers the PR Guy in his excitement. “But look again…it’s changed. That SPY must have gotten right next to it!”

“Is that masking tape?” queries the CFO. “Cheap masking tape? I hope so!”

“Isn’t it MYSTERIOUS?” asks the PR Guy.

“What’s mysterious is why you still have a job,” mutters the Chief Engineer.

“Who could these SPIES be?” continues the PR Guy, his spirits undampened by the harsh and thoughtless Chief Engineer.

“Frankly, I don’t see why you keep yelling the word ‘spies’”,  says the CEO. “We get the idea; some blighter has taken photos of our Bachmann Not-S0-Big Hauler.”

“But look, Chief,” says the PR Guy, “look at those tanks! Doesn’t that pique your interest?”

“I’ll pique your nose with my fist if you don’t shut up,” says the Chief Engineer. He’s well into his fifth stout.

“All right you guys, come on, now,” whines the PR Guy. “You guys aren’t playing along on this thing at all.  The word SPY is supposed to generate interest in our readers…make ‘em pay attention to what’s going on in the yards at the Paris to Peking Railway, see? Spies are edgy… cool, you know?”

“Oh, I get it,” says the CEO, “it’s a publicity stunt, like cramming college kids into lemonade stands, or pitchers, or something like that!”

“Yes!” The PR Guy is delighted someone gets it. “Exactly like that! If our readers think we have spies in our yards, they’ll think we’ve got something cool to talk about!”

“Let ‘em talk aboot this,” slurs the Chief Engineer. “You’re an idiot.”

The donating Ferrari, in fact, was a really neat looking 1/20th scale red Enzo manufactured by Meijiaxin Toys Company, LTD (you can find them at www.mjxtoys.com).  It’s a remote control toy car my brother and I picked up at Toys R Us for $25…a little steeper than I was willing to pay for this project, but the cheaper units didn’t appear to have any speed control, just forward and reverse.

The project, of course, is the seemingly never-ending conversion of the Bachmann Big Hauler 4-6-0 to a Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler 4-4-0 that will be able to negotiate the tight radius turns on the Paris to Peking Railway. In hacking the two inches out of the frame length to shorten the wheelbase, I had to hack two inches out of the boiler to match.  The Big Hauler’s PC board, which accommodated not just the receiver but also sound, was three inches long and sat in the boiler…with the boiler shortened, there is now no place for the board to fit!

All right, I’ll tell you the truth: when I first started on this project I just tore into the boiler, cutting wires and pulling out pieces until I got it to the length I wanted. One of the victims of that violent attack was that PC board. I believe it works, but it’s been shorn of its wires, and now, truly, no longer fits.

But the Ferrari board is just a little one-incher. Not only that, but the Ferrari has neat LED headlights that work! We were concerned, my brother and I, that the six D Cell batteries might overpower the little board, which was designed to handle the juice from just 4 AA batteries.  As you can see from the picture, we need not have worried. Everything seems to be working fine.

All right, I’ll tell you the truth:  I didn’t do the installation myself. My brother did the electronic work quickly and excellently.  He was able to get the board to fit into the stubby front end of the boiler so that access to the power switch is gained by popping off the press-fit boiler end plate. It strikes me as rather funny that one end of the boiler pops off to reveal the board and the switch, while the other end of the boiler pops off to allow access to the batteries. Like a real locomotive, the entire structure of the boiler is in use, between the batteries and the radio. No fake empty spaces here!

The beast runs pretty well. The motion is a little herky-jerky every now and again, but I think that’s because we crammed the antenna alongside the batteries in the boiler, right over the motor. There may be a lot of EMF interference in there.  The original Big Hauler runs the antenna around the inside of the cab roof…maybe we’ll do something like that.

The idea for this project came from Kalmbach’s Tips & Tricks for your garden railway,  a supplement that came with my subscription to Garden Railways magazine.  It was inexpensive, easy (well, for me, because I didn’t do it!), and effective…the darn thing actually works!

There is just one little issue; the R/C Ferrari was designed to blink its headlights when running backwards. Take a guess at what happens to the Not-So-Big Hauler’s light in reverse!

With the onset of winter hours…who knew they’d monkey with the clocks?…I don’t get home from working at the Evil Empire until the sun has set.  That means our exciting mid-week adventures now need to move indoors. That’s okay…there’s plenty to do!

Case in point is the Bachmann Not-So-Big Hauler. As you’ll recall, and maybe you will, we’re in the process of reducing a Bachmann Big Hauler from a 4-6-0 to a 4-4-0, changing its profile to a European style tank engine along the way.

Shortening the wheelbase turned out to be the easiest part of the job.  I hacked a two inch long piece out of the boiler to accommodate elimination of the forward drive wheels. The wheels came right out and everything fit back together just fine down there on the chassis. I was even able to compensate for the change in taper of the original boiler.

The cosmetic changes, however, have been a rather challenging adventure. First there was remodeling the cab…how do you make a wild west locomotive cab look like a French  teapot? Schwoops, my friend, and little round windows!

Now the time has come to build the tanks on either side of the boiler. I’ve installed nice wooden blocks to stand behind the promised plastic skin on the tanks themselves.

You know I’m cheap…

“Economy-minded” says the PR Guy at the Paris to Peking Railway Co. board meeting.

“Oh yes,” says the CEO, “that’s a dandy phrase. Let’s use that one!”

“He’s a rummy cheap bas…”starts the Chief Engineer.”

“…bastion of thriftiness,” finishes the PR Guy. “We must stay positive!”

“I’m positive he’s a rummy cheap jackanapes,” the Chief Engineer mutters into his stout. It’s only his third beer, so he’s just at the verbally challenging stage of the evening.

…even though I work a good solid day at the Evil Empire, I make a poor wage. I drive 43 miles each way each day to earn a paltry sum. My wife tells me I need to get another job…I tell her I have a pretty good job now and she says “no, another job.” As a result my discretionary funds are rather discreet, as in absolutely unavailable!

But I’m also a packrat, and have saved some of the buildings from an HO layout I had in a basement well over a decade ago. This little gem sacrificed its nice sheet styrene walls for the tank skin.

Alas, the plastic is rather old, and has gone brittle. Not only that, but the majority of the details like windows and doors are rather well cemented in and won’t pop off. Turned window-side in it works okay, but it’s not my first choice.

So, we’re started on tanks. We’ll probably find a better source for sheet plastic…I may beg a few shekels from the Budget and Finance Committee (Mrs. Turner) and go to the hobby shop…but these crummy pieces provide nice templates so that I won’t waste too much sheet plastic when we reach the time to cut!

“Nothin’ but cheap scum!” roars the inebriated Chief Engineer. “Tearing doon a nice buildin’ like that for the plastic inside! Y’ought ta be ashamed o’ yerself!”

“I think it’s a rather clever way to recycle materials,” says the CEO.

“I’ll use that,” says the PR Guy. “That’s good!”

“Can’t we just adjourn the meeting and call it day?” grumbles the CFO.

“Oh, very well,” says the CEO. “Let’s go home. Meeting adjourned.”