It’s all very well having amazing scratchbuilding skills that folk Oooooo and Ahhhhhh over, but let’s face it, scratchbuilding to a high standard takes aaaaaaggggeeees and I find that it can take me so long to build a quality locomotive that when I do finish it the railway it was supposed to run on has gone bust months ago.
What to do? The answer is to build a quick and dirty lokey(s) that can get out there and run things in the meantime. This latest creation of mine is a very quick and very dirty locomotive indeed. A true scrapbox special.
Taaaaa Daaaa!
Not entirely finished yet, but showing very strong promise. The bodyshell is lightly butchered Hartland 0-4-0 switcher, the underframe is from a double worm drive New Bright 2-6-0 loco. This lokey, - which is actually supposed to be No:2, not No:8, - will be a 2-6-2 well tank when complete; it will be battery powered with hand in the cab controls, which is what I want in a PWD (Public Works Dept) lokey used for track testing and track laying; And it will also have a trick electronic speed control (electronics shop kitset, - I’m not that clever) on board to enable nice slow and controlable running. That generous cab is quite capable of swallowing a 12v sealed lead acid at need, but the usual battery load will be 2-3 NiMH 9v cells hitched in parallel and hidden in the boiler. The cab is going to be heavily revised with new sides & etc by the way, but the roof will stay as it is.
So there you are, a quick and dirty conversion that looks better than what I started with as raw material. [:)]
Annie