Hot Under the Collar

As Saturday was the monthly club meeting, I wasn't going to bother with too much dirty work on the layout.  So I just brought down some of my HO scale Logging Locomotives and Wagons for a checkout.

So I stripped down my Bachmann 3 Truck Climax, as Peter A was about to order some spares for his two truck version and we may as well share freight for a small order of parts, if I needed any.  

I could have sworn my loco already had metal gears, but it turned out it still has plastic bevel gears in all three trucks. So I politely said to myself, "Dang".  AND, one had already split.  These are really tiny bevel gears that press fit onto a small spline shaft.

Here is the rear truck, or bogie, being stripped down to get at the above gears.  I am dreading having to push new metal gears back on when they arrive, as the plastic ones are easier, but still a real bugger to get on.  I'll probably learn some new swear words I reckon.

Well I thought - I'm a smart fellow, I'll just disconnect the rear truck and use the good gears in it to fix the broken truck in the middle.  After doing this, and putting the loco all back together again and feeling pretty smug about it, I put the loco on the test track... Nothing.  Zip, nada, no go.

It turns out the decoder for controlling the loco is in the last truck - so another little naughty word or three was uttered "dag nab it".

So I went and advised Peter of my requirements and then put all the "bits" into a little plastic baggie and put it away.

Luckily I had also brought down my Rivarossi 3 Truck Heisler loco.  So onto the layout it went with 4 logging wagons and a couple of laps of the club layouts' top deck was made - took absolutely ages!  Even at half throttle, it was crawling... beautifully slow she was.  And down at about 15 percent throttle she barely moves - wonderful - love it - fantastic  :-)