Bachmann Robinson 04 - DCC chipping a steamer!

My interests in UK railways are somewhat eclectic and I have models from most eras ranging from Stephenson's Rocket through to some of the latest diesels and electrics. Whilst most of the pictures of my Last Great Project layout feature diesels I fancied running some steam. This came out of the storage box and is a Bachmann model of the Robinson 04 which was a freight loco with a 2-8-0 wheel configuration. A splendid model it is too and I have had it about 15 years but never DCC chipped it. However, that changed!

You can see it was designed for tractive effort rather then speed with the small driving wheels whereas express passenger locos had large driving wheels for speed.

Luckily, this model is wired to have a DCC chip fitted so all I had to do was remove the tender body held on with four screws.

With the body off, the blanking plug was taken off ready for the 21 pin decoder to be fitted.

With the chip fitted it was time to program it and then onto the layout to test!

It runs lovely! 

All I have to do now is to fit a crew into that fantastically detailed cab!

Tiny!

This is my smallest powered 00 gauge piece of rolling stock and it is tiny!

Produced by Bachmann, it is a model of the Wickham Trolley originally used by the mainline and now by many preserved railways for track maintenance purposes. The model is that small that the motor is in the towed wagon and there is no room for a conventional DCC decoder although there have been some innovative modellers who have managed to cram one in but that is not for me!

It is a fantastic model, full of character and you just cant help liking it even if it is tiny - well that is my view!

Every little bit helps!

 

It has been a busy few days of gardening duties here at WMD HQ with hedges being cut, flower beds cleared and grass cutting so crawling back into the Man Cave after that, especially being in the sun all day, has not been as productive as I had hoped. In the main I have just played operated trains which is relaxing. However, there has been some ballasting going on with a bit more done - not a lot but as the advert for that UK supermarket says, every little bit helps!

The good thing about doing this job during the warm weather is that the dilute PVA that is used to glue the ballast in place dries within hours rather than days during the Winter!

SOS or in other words a Shelf Of Shame.

Most modellers have an SOS, or in other words a Shelf Of Shame. This is a place where stalled, broken or just 'lost interest' projects reside until such time as they are restarted, fixed or interest is rekindled. I have such a shelf, well actually probably a shelf and several boxes, but lets just deal with the shelf for the moment! On this shelf, amongst other things, was this Hornby Class 86 in BR blue.

 Bought second hand or pre-loved depending on your preferred term, from Hattons some years ago it came, unusually for this era of model, with DCC fitted by its previous owner. It ran well and did so for some while until one day it just stopped. I had no idea why and at the time I did not have the time to investigate so onto the SOS it went! There it stayed until today when I thought I would like to run that and then remembered why it was on the SOS. However, with a little time available I took it down and put a 9v battery to the pickups just to make sure it was a non-runner. Nothing! No sign of the motor doing anything.

Time to open it up and deal with either the defunct DCC chip or a broken wire. Taking it apart reveled a bit of a mess of wires but nothing obviously broken or unattached. Interestingly it is also fitted with a stay alive module which supplied power to the motor for a few seconds if the loco looses electrical contact with the track. Anyway, just out of curiosity and a vein hope that the problem might have fixed itself, I applied the battery again. The motor ran! Moving the wires about to see if that would induce the fault again the motor still ran. It was my lucky day! A self fix electrical problem! 

Body back on and back on the track it runs perfectly!

If only all my SOS residents were this easy to fix or finish!

Get Out Of Jail card!

As it was a nice afternoon, Mrs. Woody and me went to Easton Walled Gardens to sit in the sun and have a picnic lunch. Very nice it was to. It is always interesting to walk round the gardens and see what the gardeners have been up to, or in this case not! As posted earlier this week I managed to put the Rocks By Rail trusted mower out of action. Whilst a solution is in the post to get the mower back on the grass and cutting it, I was taken by the fact that at Easton they have adopted the philosophy of No Mow May for much of their grass.

Now if the solution for the mower fails this could be my Get Out Of Jail card of adopting No Mow May at the Museum! Well at least for a couple of weeks until June comes!

Whilst escorting Mrs. W through the gift shop and avoiding items that she might wish to purchase, I did notice these which most hotels used to supply in guest's rooms before the age of instant messaging and all other electronic communications and when people wrote letters! These are actually based on fictional hotels from TV and the Fawlty Towers one brings back memories of the comic genius of the writers and actors. Must start going through my old collection of the two series on DVD which is something before the days of streaming!

Coalfish!

One of the things, or just in case Mrs. Woody is reading this I will rephrase that to, one of the few things that I bought at the Market Deeping Model Railway Show was a pack of three Hornby wagons. Following on from various fish references over the past couple of weeks, these are models of the MHA Coalfish wagon and these ones are in EWS livery. 

I already have several of these, all bought second hand or pre-loved according to your taste, so should now have a suitably significant rake or indeed shoal of these.

They are a comparatively modern wagon in a way as the bodies were designed to carry ballast spoil from maintenance jobs.

Built during the 1990s, they used the chassis from redundant HAA hopper wagons used on the merry go round coal deliveries to power stations.

And if you are wondering if there is a coalfish, yes there is (related to Pollock), but these Coalfish wagons were actually named that because their chassis previously carried coal hoppers! 

Not the best of days!

There are days when things just don't go right. For me the day started with putting banners out for the Spring Bank Holiday events at the Rocks By Rail Museum. IU needed to replace the banners from the last event and that usually means a straight swap. However someone had taken some of the posts that I use from two of the sites which was not a great start to the day. Eventually arriving at the Museum I needed to fit a new drive belt to the mower. I had got the belt and that was a straightforward job to fit. 

But, I also needed to fit a new pull cord to the starter. Things did not go well! To cut a long story short, the mechanism exploded into parts as I worked on it with a large spring uncoiling its way across the floor. Despite getting it all back together, it refused to work as it should. By this time it was almost time to go home so I put the mower away in disgust!

At least some things were going right for the others with more ballast being added to the track from the Trout ballast wagon - there's those fish references again! At least that did not break!

Anyway, the day is over so tomorrow will be better!

A visual record of some things!

The WMD film crew have been busy over he past few weeks keeping a bit of a record of matters related to My Last Great Project 00 gauge layout.

For your cure to insomnia, WMD presents.....

A rake or is that shoal of Turbots!

I have talked in the past about various fish names given by British Railways to their large fleet of maintenance wagons. This continues with todays private operators. I have a few fish related wagons but today I got my rake, or should that be shoal, of Turbots out in EWS livery. Very smart they look to although far to clean to be on a real railway. One day I will weather them but in the meantime here they are hauled by EWS Class 60 60042!

Glue issues!

Normally in my Man Cave I have to suffer the cold as Mrs. Woody says it costs too much to put the heater on! One of the consequences of the near refrigerator  temperatures is that glues normally take a long time to dry - especially PVA. In this weather though, the Man cave is near sauna like to the extent that the PVA glue dries before I even bring the two parts being glued together! However, I have managed to somehow glue some more parts of the hidden loops structure together.

These are the piers that hide the joint in the brick paper. It is a slow job which would be a bit faster with some air con. Wonder how Mrs. W would feel about that n the Man Cave?