Thanks for all the kind words, everyone!
9 February 2025
After a bit more work I managed to get the hoppers finished. Here are five of them on the layout:
I added the last two at the end of January.
In mid-January I finally got the track I ordered. It was stuffed into a mailing tube that was a bit too short, which resulted in some slight damage to the ends of a few of the sticks of track, and the entire batch was scrunched up when it was stuffed into the tube. Here’s how it looked when I took it out:
It actually looks worse than it appears in this photo. I am able to straighten it out as I use it, though, so not much loss.
My sidings on the Cody branch (which includes Powell) are all code 55, so I wasn’t able to work on Powell until I got this track. Here, on January 20th, I’ve laid the center siding for the town:
And on the 21st I added the final siding - a short one adjacent to the sugar beet dump (which will mostly be in the aisleway).
That siding is just long enough for three beet hoppers to sit in the clear:
I spent a couple days wiring and testing the new track in Powell. Everything seems okay, so I moved on to the Doodlebug, which was not running real well at the last operating session.
On January 23rd I pulled the bug apart and removed the powered wheels. I expected to find cracked gears, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Both drive axles had cracked gears. I ordered replacement gears (at an obscene price!) from NWSL and put the Doodlebug aside for a couple weeks.
The new gears arrived a few days later. On February 6th I got back to it. With the help of my NWSL wheel and gear puller I was able to easily swap out the old gears for the new ones. Here I’m set up to pull the first wheel:
Everything went back together okay (a miracle considering what a pile of crap the entire mechanism really is), but when I test ran the bug, the drive train was screaming like a banshee! It ran okay, but it emitted an almost constant shrieking noise.
The next day I tore the entire gearbox apart.
I don’t know how this thing ever ran at all! The gearbox was absolutely packed with grease. There was enough in there to lubricate a couple dozen locomotives. When I pulled the box halves apart there was a perfect impression of the gears on one side, and the other half, in this shot, was nearly as bad:
Must have taken me the better part of an hour to clean it all up:
Then I lubed all the bearings with Labelle 108 while reassembling the gearbox, and finally added dabs of Labelle 106 grease to the worm and gears.
It took me most of the day to get the Doodlebug back together (it really is a pile of garbage underneath the shell - up to this point I always had a good opinion of Bachmann’s Spectrum line. Not so much now). But finally it was done and I got it back on the track for another test run.
It still sounds a bit like it’s grinding coffee beans, but it’s quieter than it’s ever been. And it runs great. I wish I’d checked the current draw before I started - with all that half-petrified grease gone, I’ll be it pulls a lot less current now than it did before.
While I was waiting for the gears from NWSL I pulled out the SD9 I bought from ebay and got started with decoder installation. I’d bought a non-sound (diesels sound like white noise to me) TCS decoder with keep-alive and was ready to install it.
There was nowhere to put it! Nearly all the space in the shell is filled with weight! Because the decoder has the keep-alive it’s pretty thick. I needed to trim away some of the weight to make room for it over the front truck. In this shot you can see where I marked the weight for trimming:
Using mostly just a hacksaw I was able to cut away the necessary volume. I half expected I’d break the weight cutting it this way, but I didn’t (it was a good day!).
While I had the loco disassembled anyway I pulled both trucks and removed the bottom cover to check the gears. No cracks!
Like the Doodlebug, the SD9 was way over lubricated, this time just with oil. I cleaned it off as best I could and relubricated everything. After reassembly I installed the decoder:
You’d almost think I knew what I was doing, wouldn’t you? Sheer dumb luck is what it was.
After that it went on the track. Ran really well. I just wish the steamers were this easy.
All in all it doesn’t look too bad - for a diseasel:
Still to do is install the steam generator details on the forward hood.
I bought a similar SD7 right after I bought the SD9. I’m waiting for a decoder for it to arrive. These will be consisted together and put to work hauling max-length trains up the helix from east staging. The 2-8-2 Mikados and even the 2-10-2 Santa Fe’s aren’t quite up to that task.
I wasn’t quite done yet. When I was running a 2-10-2 past the west Casper switch it derailed. Every time. The front driver set would climb the outside rail, and so did the front truck on the tender. Everything else goes through there fine, but not the Santa Fe’s.
There was no kink at the rail joiners:
and the railheads felt fine to my fingers. I checked track gauge and it was okay too. I took a bunch of pictures along the railheads looking for anything out of whack.
I ran a 2-10-2 through the area very slowly and videoed the wheels close-up at 60 frames per second. I blew up the video on my computer and ran it at one quarter speed. I could watch the driver and tender truck climb right up onto the railhead and drop off.
Finally I concluded that the track just past the switch points had just enough of a drop in the outside rail that the 2-10-2’s front driver would rise high enough for the flange to clear the railhead, while nothing with a shorter wheelbase would. So I put a .010 shim under the track just past the points and leading into the curve:
The 2-10-2’s now roll through with no issues. I’m going to leave this like this for a couple of operating sessions to make sure the trouble really is cured, then I’ll trim the shim to the edge of the ties and re-ballast.
And there we are. Now I’m going to go and do something simple, like build a freight car kit.