Missing the obvious!

Back to some model making matters. On my bench for some weeks has been the Central Trains Class 156 DMU, a Hornby model that suddenly stopped running for no apparent reason. In true Woody style, I just put it to one side pending further investigation when I had time! That is never a good prospect for a model but it has only taken me four weeks to ge round to looking at this which is almost an unheard of short time for me!

My first thought was that the DCC chip had failed as I could not get any noise out of the motor in either DCC or DC mode. The body had yo come off and I replaced the chip with a blanking plug which should have allowed the motor to run on DC power. Nothing!

Taking the bogie out of the chassis I went as far as actually getting the motor out of its housing and testing it. It worked which was good but putting it back and applying power to the wheels was meet with silence.

Now it might be obvious in the photo below but for some reason it was not obvious to me at the time of looking at the actual bogie that the wires from the wheels and electrical pickups were no longer connected to the motor! It took me about 40 minutes to finally realise this rather fundamental issue was the cause of the problem!

With that fact finally in my head the soldering iron came out and the wires were soldered back in place. With the DCC chip refitted it was ready to put the body back on.

Back on the layout all was back to normal which was great!

Meanwhile as we now have lighter evenings although my body clock is still not aware of the hour lost, I did manage to get out in the greenhouse planting out some tomato, pepper and cucumber plants that I have germinated in the warmth of the house and I also planted some lettuce, spinach, onion and sunflower seeds. Hopefully their growth will be obvious so I don't miss it!

Back to the 90s with Central Trains!

I am slowly going through my collection of rolling stock. Some of it has unfortunately been boxed away for far too long so I am getting them out and enjoying them which is the whole reason for having them. This example is a Hornby Class 153 that I bought second hand about 15 or more years ago. It had been fitted with a DCC chip which was nice and saved me the trouble. 

Out of the box it is a single unit rail car that was very much a backstay of many lightly used services in real life. Central Trains, which was one of the first tranche private companies to take over from British Rail in the 1990s had several of these and very smart they looked in that two tone green livery 

In fact I have a bit of a soft spot for Central Trains as they did operate where I lived and worked in the 90s. I have a number of their passenger units including this Class 156 two car unit just coming into shot.

This is the unit which again is a Hornby model. I do have two of these so they can run as a four car multiple working if I want.

In that 90s period, whilst Central Trains were providing passenger services, EW&S, as they started out as, before becoming plain EWS, were hauling freight with a wide variety of locos such as this Class 58 behind the two Central Trains units in the picture below. The two companies did operate in the same geographical area so it was common to see the two companies trains pass each other and as I do have a few EWS liveried locos I have on my bucket list to get them all out with the Central Trains stock and go back to the 90s!