5th September 2014
Anyone running a 00 garden railway in Britain will very soon discover that
keeping it clean can take up a lot of time. And it's not like cleaning the car,
or the house, which can always be put off until tomorrow. If your rails ain't
clean, the trains won't run.
Something our railway owner might also
discover is that running trains regularly helps keep the track clean, especially
if assisted by an occasional run with a railhead polishing and vacuum cleaning
train. If done once every few days, this seems to be adequate; if left for a
week, a manual clean with a track-cleaning rubber will be necessary.
It's not just the rails that need cleaning. The tunnel attracts a wide
variety of wildlife, from insects, woodlice, spiders that build webs across the
tunnel bore, slugs and snails that derail your train, to mice that eat nuts and
acorns and leave the shells on the track. I've even found a large frog jammed in
the tunnel.
Today's short running session doubled as a running test of
two locos recently acquired second-hand, and needing quite a bit of attention to
minor but annoying faults. The first was a Bachmann "Hall", originally supplied
with DCC decoder fitted. In its first outdoor trial, it had suddenly lost the
changes I had made to CVs (mainly just changing the address away from 3) and
reverted to the default (address 3). So I changed its address in the handset,
and continued the trial. For its next trick, it waited until I was bringing it
to a stop, and when the selected speed was down to 1 or 2, it suddenly shot
forward for about a second at high speed. Not good! I opened it up, and the only
thing I could see that might have caused this sort of problem was the two
capacitors and inductors fitted in the feed to the motor. I thought I'd start
with the capacitors as they are easy to snip off, which I did. Today's trial was
to see if the symptoms had gone away. I did several runs at different speeds up
the 1 in 50 with 6 coaches (all it can manage), and it ran sweetly. It will take
a few more hours of trouble-free running before I am confident the fault is
fixed, but it looks promising.
The other loco was a Bachmann BR standard
4MT 4-6-0, to which I had fitted a decoder. It ran up and down the 1 in 50 with
trains of between 7 and 11 coaches, double heading with a class 4 2-6-0. The
only observation was that the tender seemed to be dragging on one side, and at
intervals would emit a creaking, groaning noise. On later examination, the cause
of this proved to be a large dob of carpet fluff and hair wrapped tightly around
one of the tender axles. When I had first received the model, the loco's axles
had been similarly encumbered to the extent that it would barely move at all,
and I had spent a couple of hours with a pair of tweezers removing it. But I had
missed one of the tender axles, an omission I have now rectified, and I hope
that there will be no groaning at the next running session.
Attached are
a couple of pictures of the double-headed train. If you are a regular follower
of these reports, you might notice that I have put the GWR Centenary coaches
away in their box, and found a rake in the BR maroon that is more appropriate to
most of my locos.
