Monthly Archives: October 2019

Derailments Aren’t Always Easy To Fix!

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It’s been a busy two weeks since my last post; I needed to focus my time organizing my club’s annual exhibition, which was another great success as we continue to build on the event year after year, and I’ve been doing some traveling.  This week’s post will be about a train from another country, not that I was there, but I found it interesting.

Every now and again we, as model railroaders, have trains fall off the track, and if you’re unlucky they can end up somewhere that’s hard to reach.  This also happens in the real railways but it takes considerably more effort to pick the trains up.  Normally when there’s a derailment, which can’t be corrected with a re-railer, the rail cranes are called out to do the heavy lifting.  If the train is too far from the tracks a road crane is usually called in.  But sometimes the accident happens where there simply are no roads.  This happened in Scotland on the 28th June 2012 when a CBRf freight train of twenty-four PCA tank wagons hauled by a Class 66, number 66734, hit a landslide on the line from Corrour to Tulloch, along the shore of Loch Treig.

Fortunately nobody was hurt, but the locomotive slid down the bank towards Loch Treig and came to a rest a good distance from the line. The job of sorting out the mess was given to QTS who removed the crashed PCA tank wagons and repaired the line in just 12 days without any cranes.  They captured the whole event on this time-lapse video.

But the locomotive, weighing 130 tonnes (286600 Pounds), was simply too big and heavy for even rail cranes to safely reach and the nearest road was 4 miles away.

So the locomotive was covered up to protect it from the Scottish weather until August 2013 when the job of removing it begain.  The locomotive was declared an insurance write-off and QTS again took on the challenging job of breaking the locomotive up and removing it piece by piece. It took 70 days and again QTS captured the whole event on a time-lapse video.

All in all, this was an amazing achievement and 85% of the parts from 66734 were reused on other locomotives, but sadly this locomotive is no more.

So next time we have a train fall off at the back of the layout just remember how hard it could have been!

3D Printed Gears

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If you’ve been following my posts over the last few years you’ll know that I’ve produced several 3D printed gears for a variety of scales.  These have been available in my Shapeways shop and through my individual posts about the gears, but I realized I didn’t have a section on this site for them.  So that’s what this post is about.

The new page, which can be found here, or by using the drop-down menu above, has all the gears currently available.  There are several more in the testing phase, which will be added when ready, as well as several that are waiting to be done; often when I see a damaged locomotive going cheap I pick it up with the intention of making a new part to repair it.

So far the finished replacement gears and axles are for:

N Scale

Bachmann- 4-8-4 Northern (3rd Generation)

Bachmann 2-8-0 & 2-8-2 (1st Generation)

N Gauge

Minitrix 9F

OO Gauge

Bachmann/Mainline 0-6-0 J72

Bachmann/Mainline 4-6-0 Hall

HO Scale

Bachmann 4-8-4

Gützold v60/br106

O Scale

Rivarossi O Scale F9

G Scale

USA Trains 0-4-0 20-Ton

I’m also doing some experimenting with different materials for the gears; you can find the first post about that here.  For very small gears I’ve yet to find a better material than the Fine Detail, although for the larger gears the material is a little brittle and prone to breakage, so I’m hoping to find a suitable material for those.

I’ll be taking a break and not posting next Monday as this coming weekend is the Poole & District Model Railway Society’s Annual Exhibition. I’m the Exhibition Manager, and as fun and rewarding as organizing an event of this scale is, I’ll be needing a rest on Monday! So I’ll be back in two weeks.

Solent Summit At Warley

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Again this week my post will be brief, due to my club’s upcoming show, but I did want to let you know that this year our Modular US N Scale layout, ‘Solent Summit’, will be going to the WARLEY NATIONAL 2019 exhibition on the 22nd and 23rd of November 2019 at the NEC in Birmingham, UK.  You can read more about the show here. 

‘Solent Summit’ will have five scale miles of scenery, which is the largest exhibition layout we’ve done, with lots of new modules, one of which is my Tehachapi loop module, which looked like this the last time I shared it with you.

Hopefully, soon I’ll have some more to share with you as it looks very different now.  We also have a very interesting automated signaling system using laser range finders which, when finished, will also be shared with you.

For now, it’s back to the show planning, with a bit of Tehachapi senery work as well.