workbench update

Motorising a del Prado NS1100

A new project has landed on my workbench this week. A while ago while idly surfing around I discovered the "del Prado" range of diecast collectable trains. These were produced for a Spanish magazine, one of those ones where every week it comes with a new "limited edition" collectable on the cover and before you get a chance to cancel the subscription the next one is already on your doorstep. Anyway, the del Prado models are quite crude and very cheaply made, but they are mostly to scale and available fairly cheaply on the second hand market. So I did a bit of hunting and ordered a few that I liked the look of.

Today the package arrived and I excitedly opened them up, expecting the worst. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. I ordered three models, one each of a German, Swiss, and Dutch electric loco. Sounds like the beginning of a railfan joke. I decided to tackle the Dutch loco first, as it's really quite cute.

Populating the Glacier Express

Yes it's the Glacier Express again! First off have a look at the real thing traveling through utterly unrealistic scenery that you could never get away with on a model railway. As my granddad would say, "Switzerland is one big model railway"...

... back to the model world. There are many things that stand out about the Glacier Express, but as a passenger perhaps what you'd be most thankful for are the massive windows that the Rhaetian Railway (RhB) has put on their carriages.

And so of course Kato has put massive windows on the model, which leads to a problem...

Upgrading the Kato Glacier Express

The Kato Glacier Express (Kato No. 10-1145 and 10-1146) is a great set, but there is one glaring problem:

Passengers traveling from one carriage to another must long jump from carriage to carriage. Not good. For such a beautiful set, it seems a shame to put such gigantic gaps between the carriages; apparently this was done so that the train could negotiate 100mm radius curves, however that seems like an odd design objective for an otherwise beautiful looking model.

So I did something about it.

First of all I bought the Kato/Roundhouse close coupling set (No 28-186) from RailNippon. I was pleased with their prompt service, good prices, and simple postage. The instruction sheet is very Japanese, howe...

DCC decoder installation for the Kato Glacier Express

The Kato Glacier Express is a beautiful model of a very iconic railway. It's also the first European train that I've purchased. There is one glaring problem with it though: it's difficult to put a decoder into. I believe Digitrax now makes a drop-in decoder, but I don't have the luxury of such things, so instead I've spent the past few days hard wiring an NCE Z14SR decoder into it.

Dismantling the shell

The first step is to completely dismantle the loco. Start by gently prising the sides apart so that the top pops off the chasis.

 

DCC for the Kato TGV

My Kato S14701 TGV arrived in pretty good condition, but still needed a bit of TLC before it would run. It dates from the 1980s and the wheels looked like they haven't ever been cleaned, but apart from that, all the paint is still in tact, nothing is missing, etc, so I think I did pretty well. However that said, if I wanted it to move at all, it would need a DCC decoder.

Disassembling

First trick is to dismantle the power car. The only outward clue is a small screw on the nose which must be removed:

(Yes I know the wheels are clean here, I cheated and took this photo at the end!)

Then one needs to gently prise the body away from the shell. Do this front and back around each set of bogies.

I must be crazy

It seems that I just can't get enough of hand laid turnouts! Which is odd, because it's a pretty tedious process making them. And yet, here I am, a month later building a crossover for Raparapa. Now that trains are running, the Operations Dept has been fairly vocal about how inefficient the current system is. With a small crossover at Raparapa, they argue, trains on the second track would no longer need to reverse half the length of the country to get back onto the first main line. A fairly compelling argument I have to admit, so with that in mind I fired up the computer and drew up a template for the crossover.

Templot to the rescue again, which means about 3 minutes of drawing the turnouts, another 3 hours adjusting the sleeper spacing in 50,000 different dialog boxes, and then another 3 hours trying to convince it that just because I have a black and white printer, doesn't mean I shouldn't be forbidden from changing any of the export options. But at long last I ha a 1:1 ...