Category Archives: Rolling Stock

La Petite Anglaise

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As mentioned in a previous post, I started working on a 009 World War I layout. It’s a bit different from HOn30, the scale of my other models. The big advantage however is, that there are quite some kits readily available of the locos and rolling stock that were used during the Great War. Most of them are white metal kits … a material I have little to no experience with, so I decided to start with an easy kit – the 030t Kerr Stuart ‘Joffre’ by Five79.

A French Kerr Stuart 'Joffre'

I am not expecting this kit to be a walk in the park, but it will definitely  beat messing up the kit of the 2-6-2t Baldwin that I recently bought. My first intention was to bash it into a French 030t Decauville ‘Progrès’, but as that needed quite some adjustments and it was the first white metal kit I would try to solder together, I quickly dropped the idea. I will just build it as a French ‘Joffre’, which means that I need to replace the chimney and have to add some extra details.

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Spring cleaning

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Well, it’s not exactly spring over here in Europe, but down under in Australia it is … so time do some spring cleaning. At a model railway convention I found one of these small Decauville locos made by Jouef. It did not cost that much as the cab had broken off, but it did not run that well either.

decauville-001

Fortunately I remembered reading an article by François Fontana, where het took one of these buggers apart and gave it a good rinsing. It was published in Voie Libre, the well known French narrow gauge railway modelling magazine, which now is available as a digital version in English via Zinio.com and can be read on your iPad or Android tablet … tried it yesterday on mine and it works great!

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A man of his word

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I had to dig around in my memory a bit …but I believe it was at the beginning of 2010, that I ordered an N-drive chassis from  N-Drive Productions. Although Neville Kent and his small company fell into a quite some hardship in 2010 and 2011, he kept his promise and delivered the 12 mm short wheelbase chassis this week, together with one of his new motor bogies.

n-drive

They’re great little runners and will act as the base for a couple of future projects. The 12 mm short wheelbase chassis will power a 0-4-2t Fowler made by Chivers Finelines. Although Roger Chivers stopped producing the kits himself, they are now being made by by Five79 (owned by his son Matthew) and are available via Parkside Dundas. The motor bogie will power something completely different … a Backer & Rueb steam tram … which has nothing to do with my Queensland tramway. I just like those little buggers.

Testing, testing, …

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Well, here it is … the first test print of the Jenbach. As always, I cleaned it with acetone and added a couple of layers of Tamiya primer. Once it had fully dried, I did a quick test fit on the Bachmann chassis and bumped into my first problem. The printed body fits nice and snug over the chassis, the air tanks however are a bit too wide to slide over the side frames.

img002 - first test print

So, I sawed them off and did another test fitting. As you can see from the image above it fits quite nice, but there are some issues with the 3D-print itself. First of all, the lower sides of the cabin are bent quite a bit. It’s a known issue with FUD from Shapeways, caused by the fact that they are thin and not supported. This can easily be corrected by making them a bit thicker, so I will change that. The second issue however is a bit more serious.

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Building a Jenbach

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The Bundaberg-Jenbach was the first Australian built diesel locomotive being used for the sugar cane tramways.The Bundaberg Foundry built them under licence from Jenbacher Werke of Austria and was successful in selling two of them.The first locomotive was delivered to North Eton Sugar Mill in 1953 and the second in 1954.

jenbach - bachmann chassis

Bob Dow, a railway modeller from Brisbane, has a great construction article on his site of an HOn30 model of one these Jenbach locomotives. Being a lazy modeller myself, I decided to simplify things and started working on a 3D model. As with every model however, you first need to find a chassis and then base the model on the actual size of the chassis … trying it the other way around doesn’t really work.

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