Rummaging!

I am doing a lot of rummaging in boxes at the moment looking for certain things I know I have but can not remember where I put them! Strangely, the usual manner in which these rummages go is that you do not find what you are looking for but do find other things that you were looking for months ago or had indeed forgotten about!

For me I found an 009 loco and some coaches that I can remember having but not where they were.

The loco is an old, I believe GEM, whitemetal kit now manufactured by PECO and represents a Glyn Valley Tramway loco. It rums on an old Graham Farish 0-6-0 chassis which dates probably from the 1980s/early 90's and is DCC unfriendly!

You can see in the photo below that it is a fairly substantial piece of metal with the parts glued together with epoxy - probably Araldite. I bought this second hand about 30 years ago when I first started dabbling in 009 gauge.

In storage the chimney had broken off as the picture above shows but this was a straightforward glue job with a blob of superglue.

The chassis was given a good clean, wheels taken out and pickups cleaned and bearing surfaces lightly lubricated.

The coaches are kit built Parkside Dundas products that now trade just as Dundas. They are based on the coaches used by the Festiniog and Blaenau railway in Wales. As is usual for me, I never finished them and they have sat waiting for those last jobs for the past three decades! Those jobs include glazing Which is why I never glued the roofs on at the time and the probably long lost roof vents want fitting as well as things like door handles painting. I did reattached the Greenwich couplers which are an etched metal coupler that you bend to shape and articulate with a bent track pin.

Putting all this re-found rolling stock on the layout made an attractive train which has given me the desire to finish the coaches and convert the loco to DCC - not an easy task but if you know how it is possible. I can run it on the layout in its DC form as my Bachmann controller has a facility to allow one DC train to be run in conjunction with up to nine DCC locos. It is not good for the DC loco motor but it does at least prove that the chassis and motor work and that my servicing had not caused it any harm.