My Kingdom for a Z scale Re 6/6 - part 5

All 'looking' good, but now, how to actually get a speeding Rokuhan loco to run with a slower Marklin one...

I read on the magic interweb that you can take about .7 volts out of a wire using a diode, so 4 were soldered up in pairs and this did indeed slow the loco down a tad - enough that they run fairly comfortably together.

Experimenting:

As installed:

Then after some track cleaning, run-testing commenced. The first issue was the clearances between raised pantographs vs tunnel portals - this was quickly resolved.

As feared, the next problem was some uncoupling from the Re 6/6 on tight curves due to the long overhang of its body-mounted couplers. This was mitigated somewhat by clipping the wee 'uncoupling' nub from the underside of the coupler - on the sharpest curves this was hitting the outer rail and upsetting things.

But uncoupling remains somewhat of a problem, primarily vs the Marklin Re 4/4, as that loco is running slower and gets pushed in places, with its bogie-mounted coupler following the track line and the 6/6's sticking way out beyond the curve.

As an experiment, I put the 6/6 in front and because the 6/6 is a tad faster, the pair runs very well together with no uncoupling issues detected. Arguably the loco combination looks better too (from a distance!), as the 6/6 is a little taller than it should be. But of course this isn't what had been planned... is the 6/6 a good enough model to lead? I suppose it could be made to look a little better with more filling, painting and detailing of the nose, plus the installation of a pilot to replace the front coupler.

The other issue that has to be dealt with somehow is that my 'raised' pantos need to be lowered further to clear the fairly tight spiral in the south hill above the Wassen church just beyond where the above video stops...!

My Kingdom for a Z scale Re 6/6 - part 4

In February, when we last left the Frankenstein Re 6/6 - which you may recall was bashed out of a Marklin Ae 6/6 shell on top of a Rokuhan chassis -  it had a couple of issues to be resolved.

• The chassis runs too fast to mate up with a Marklin Re 4/4
• The Japanese prototype chassis has shorter wheelbase bogies so the thing looks a little airy underneath
• It has no pantographs (spare Marklin ones were balanced on top for pictures last time)
• The chassis has Rapido-style couplers, and I need to mate this to a Marklin Re 4/4 somehow
• The roof is a tiny bit too long, overhanging the front face slightly (mainly at one end)

Tackling these in reverse order.... The overhanging roof was something that was always going to bug me, so both roof ends were attacked with a Dremel and files to shave a tiny bit of material off, and repainted/weathered.

You can also see panto stands made from plastruct ladder on the roof

The coupling situation was resolved (hopefully!) with the arrival of Rokuhan snap-in Markin-style couplers. None of this Z scale stuff is close coupling, but as the 6/6 couplers are body mounted, it probably helps that the shafts are a little long. Hopefully...!

The original Rapido-style coupler circled in the above pic.

Pantographs were folded up and glued on top, and some boxes added between the bogies to fill the spaces somewhat. The real Re 6/6 has these boxes on one side and air reservoirs on the other, but I put boxes on both sides. As they are 'thin' in depth there is less risk of them getting in the way of the bogies moving about than thick round air tanks.

So that leaves one remaining issue :

• The chassis runs too fast to mate up with a Marklin Re 4/4

But we will leave that for another day.

Two more 4/4s under the fuzzy microscope

Two more Re 4/4 shells have been undergoing a touchup in fits and starts, with a silver roof, painted front step, replacement etched pantos and some weathering on top completed so far.

Reprinted a/c units are yet to be added. These cellphone pictures reveal all the inaccuracies that my naked eye can't detect - must adjust some of the bends on the pantos on those two. Not that these details are so noticeable when viewing trains running around a layout from the federally-mandated viewing distances...

As I have five 4/4s,  I think the next one that crosses my desk will be weathered more heavily, and there are plenty of possibilities for the last shell.

One 4/4 will be paired up with the 6/6, so that leaves either two pairs, or a triple plus a single I guess. Either way that is three sets, so two more chassis need to be worked to eliminate a coupler.

Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 6 - Fertig

There were a couple of wee things that I had intended to add onto the Re 4/4 a long while back but I completely forgot about them in the interim. Must be my intermittent incredibly-early-onset dementia...

Firstly the air conditioners that sit behind the driver's position (near the front of the port side). These were retrofitted top the real things a decade or so ago; and I see that Marklin's recent 'Gotthard Panorama Express' set has an Re 4/4 included that actually has these A/c units printed on the sides, so here's a rare "well done" bouquet from this blog for them.

I figured I'd print an outline of these onto clear decal paper with my laser printer, but it took several frustrating goes at this.

My first effort in photoshop came out all dotty (600dpi, my buttocks).  So, lacking any sensible vector drawing programs that I'm really au fait with, the accountant in me came out and doodled up something in excel.

I started out with some quite detailed ones, but when printed out to each be about 5mm tall they were all black blobs, so I simplified them and even now they look a bit strong. And now that I write this up they are a little small too, so I might do some more a little bigger for the other 4/4s.

The little white aerials over the starboard side of the cab roof were tiny squares of Plasticard glued on that will probably fall off on its first run. I also drybrushed the bogies and underbits lightly.

Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 5 - Finito

Stock vs improved Marklin Z scale Re 4/4

A few small tasks completed this 4/4 project:

• A small knob of white paint was slopped between the front windows on the UIC plug
• The 'step/platform' protrusion (above the starboard buffer) on the front edge was painted gray to match the prototype (it was silver on the model)
• Added the pantos of course - these looked to be sitting a tad low on the dry run, so they have been raised up further on some tiny rods of styrene
• A dash more weathering was applied to the roof and pantos. As previously mentioned, the 4/4s are kept fairly clean so I decided not to weather the sides and front.

One small irk remains the front silver-edged windows, which on the model have square corners on the outboard side rather than curved like on the corners facing the middle. I suppose a little dollop of red might sort that out but there is a high probability of making a mess doing that. I suppose I should add the rear-view mirrors on the starboard corners too. Someday...

Is all this worth the effort given that the trains will typically be viewed from a distance? Hard to say. While the stock model looks pretty good, the revisions do improve it. The silver roof and scale pantographs do look good, but now the Z scale flextrack looks awful!

I will have to be very careful with those pantos - its easy to forget they are there when you can hardly see them.

Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 4 - Roof

Most of the SBB Re 4/4s that I saw on the Gotthard were clean enough to see that they had a silver/light grey roof:

Whereas the Marklin ones have the same dark grey used at the base of the body. This isn't a terrible faux-pas because the roof weathers with carbon from the pantograph over time, but I felt that painting the roof silver might make an improvement visually.

Before that was done, the bolt hole for the Marklin panto would have to be filled in.

And indeed it was with a rectangle of thin .010 plasticard; and a square of plastruct ladder that had been thinned down a little was attached to the top of this to 'lift' the new panto off the roof a little as the real one is. My structure isn't entirely prototypical but I think it will look fine when the etched panto is glued on top.

Then I decided to bite the bullet and paint the roof silver - a risky endeavor that could end very messily, but with the aid of my magnifying light and a very subtle demarcation line that exists on the shell, it wasn't as hard as I had feared (although in these harsh closeups it looks like I need to touch up one bit that I didn't notice with the naked eye):

Per the prototype, you'll see that the larger grilles were left the Marklin gray colour while the center one was silvered up.

In the above pic you may note some thinned black added to those end grilles and in various shades to the roof as the first step in the weathering process. There seems to be a distinctive pattern to the Re 4/4 tops, with the dark panto-droppings down the centre, and often a little rust on the sides of the cab roof. The locos must be cleaned fairly regularly, as other than the tops of the roof and some occasional fading of the red, most 4/4s I saw at the time were in reasonable nick.

After this pic was taken, some dullcote was sprayed on and chalks applied to make the effect more subtle. More on that tomorrow.

Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 3 - Pantographs

The very day I received my Re 4/4s, a plan was hatched to replace the big ugly Marklin pantographs with finer, non-functional, etched examples.

Sure, etched ones won't go up and down and they won't collect current, but... I don't need them to. I just need them to look better.

As can be seen here, the real things seem almost invisible:

A tad finer and more petite than the model below. Note that the big current collection shoe is almost the full width on the model compared to the proto:

To be fair, the Marklin panto had to be engineered sturdily-enough to operate up and down consistently over a long period of time in the gritty and dirty hard knocks world of model railways; and be wide enough to collect current over the imperfect, tight, wobbly track and catenary setups that are possible on Z scale layouts. Although I'd wager that only a handful of people actually use the overhead current-collection option on marklin layouts. Indeed reading between the lines on a recent Marklin release makes me wonder if they may drop this option in future.

But be that as it may... the plan was to etch some replacements, and the above was drawn in Sketchup eons ago based on a closeup crop of one of my pics:

And after several years of sitting on this, I finally got a mate who is good at this sort of thing to set it up and get a prototype etched in Phosphor Bronze for me by PPD in Scotland. This material is stronger than brass and should be able to take the inevitable bumps and knocks better.

Well, don't those look fine and dandy?  I don't own any 'Blacken-it' chemical etch or gun blue, so applied a low-tech Sharpie black marker pen to them instead before getting out the pliers.


Folded up:

It took about 5 minutes of prodding with pliers, tweezers and confused looks to do this one, so I will refine my technique as I become more familiar with them, which will result in a 'neater' appearance as I had to bend and rebend a few things.

 The phosphor bronze is certainly much more forgiving than brass, and much stronger indeed. You may notice that I folded the lower support strut the wrong way too...

It certainly looks a bit more scale than the old ones... More fiddling will follow.

Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 2 - Pilot/coupler

The next obvious thing to tackle on the Re 4/4 is the couplers situation...

Now I'm actually OK with the big, horny, clunky, Marklin coupler in general. It may not be pretty, but it does the job. Changing them all to Microtrains would be a big time-suck and an expense for little improvement in looks and no improvement in functionality - indeed they'd probably be less-reliable with my luck. 

As for their clunky aesthetics, I don't actually think people will be peering up close between the wagons on a layout like Wassen, so the only horrible Marklin coupler that it really makes sense to fret about is the one at the front of the train, as that is where most people look.

Obviously I don't need a coupler at the front of a lead loco, as I'm not running around trains or doing complex bidirectional shunting moves (I doubt many people are in Z scale...)  But most of my trains are double-headed, so some locos need couplers at both ends.

So the plan is to remove the coupler from one end of a few of my locos and replace it with the 'pilot/headstock/cowcatcher' at that end.

If this was done cleverly, the pilot would be attached to the chassis rather than the bodyshell. This would allow shells to be swapped out so that, for example, my blue SBB Cargo 4/4 might sometimes be seen in the lead and might sometimes be the second engine.

So one of the bogies was detached from the chassis and it's coupler removed. Some of the cast-on pilots and a little extra plastic was removed from the front corners of the bogie to provide more clearance between the bogie and my new pilot while swiveling. You can see the angled pilot faces carefully glued to two rectangles of styrene in the corners of the chassis below.

This means there are no issues with bogie clearance, but if there is a collision, the thing is going to come adrift. Perhaps some tiny screws in the corners (or even some brass rod) through the chassis and into these blocks might make things more likely to survive future altercations.

The curved corner pieces being made up from styrene pipe:

And attached in this blurry pic:

A few bits of (grossly oversize) brass wire later:

Hardly dramatic, but it looks a little better closeup. Next time the detailing might be a little finer...

Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 1 - Inside

As you may have noticed, I tend to model at a million miles or an hour or at zero.

The ETR 610 has made some progress, but it hasn't been a tsunami of progress that keeps me motivated. It has instead moved very much from one stumbling point to the next.

So in the hopes of restarting in Z for a short while, I have had a number of ideas on the back burner to improve the looks of some of my locos.

Let's start with the Re 4/4. For Z scale, this really is a superb model that is crisp, well-detailed, well-painted, and most importantly, conveys the look of the original with only a few compromises to fit with the Marklin 'system'.

Two main things stand out as needing improvement:

1. The massive silver pantographs - these look better in the factory dark chrome on my BLS locos but I expect one could do better...
2. The massive coupler sticking out the front.

In addition there are a few quick and easy cosmetic things that could also be tried.  For example, Zettzeit.ch has some 'machine room' interiors that you can print out and install behind the three large side windows.

http://zettzeit.ch/2015-10-17-16-00-54/elektroloks/re-4-4-ii-maschinenraum

You print this out so that it is 35mm wide (I stuck a few together in Photoshop first to print off a bunch in bulk) and ... there you have it. 

The jury is still out as to whether I like these or not. Might have to try a few that are darker ( I may have lightened them a bit much in photoshop).

RABe 503: Feet Examination

Some ups and downs on the plastic passenger train...

As for a chassis, you may recall the race was on between a well-discounted but still expensive Rokuhan Shinkansen three car set (one powered centre car and two dummy end cars) and some incredibly cost effective Rokuhan 'Shorty' chassis. I could have gotten a whole trainset of these for half the price of the Shinkansen set.

First things first. A dremel was applied to the 'tabs' that intrude into the interior space where I'll want to put a chassis later. These tabs are visible in the upper car in the pic below. The lower protrusions that are the doors and the bogie supports were also thinned out from the inside to give more interior space for a chassis.

As for the chassis race, it seemed that the Rokuhan Shinkansen may have been quite the expensive dead end as far as becoming the underguts of my fancy passenger train goes...

It's really, really wide, much wider than expected, and the bogies are too close together, again, also unexpected!

Even putting in a fair bit of of surgery thinning this down (as reassembled in today's first pic with the Shorty above), it's still a smidge wider than my carriage can take, but will fit with the carriage ends removed and the sides prised apart a little. That might be bearable in terms of width, and I suppose the Shapeways top could be shortened if those inboard bogies bother me - and they might not be so obvious in a 6 car passenger train in Z scale where all the other cars have their bogies positioned more correctly. Perhaps I'll get away with it, but I may need to shorten it anyway if I want to use those couplers.

The dummy cars will basically be scrapped except for their bogies. I could use the pickups and lighting setups, but I'm not sure I can be bothered putting the effort in at this stage - perhaps that is something to be returned to in future. 

The Shorties were probably the more sensible option in hindsight, although their coupler shanks are a bit short to be useful here as can be seen below. Perhaps they can be extended, or body mounted. Or replaced with something simple. 

In the meantime, some paint has been spilt on the Shapeways tops to varying effect.

A Tale of Six Transwaggons

Following on from where we left off here, here, here, and here ...

...the last two items that were procured while over in Europe were another pair of Transwaggon branded Habbiins* bogie boxcars.

For some reason I tend to trawl eBay looking for bargains when I'm over in that part of the world figuring the shipping cost will be less. Sometimes the item seems a good price, but the shipping is exorbitant, but for these - from two different German sellers - it was the same reasonable cost anywhere worldwide so I shipped them down to the Antipodes.

Being in the correct scheme already, I didn't have to do much to do with them when they got here.

The roof and ends on the TW branded ones are a chocolate brown for some reason so I painted them a gull gray which I think looks good with the silver sides.

 I also picked out the tiedown hooks above the bogies and some handrails in yellow.

Plus a little gentle weathering on one (the other is completely unweathered - gasp! Not often you see that on one of my projects...

Six of these is enough for a decent looking train I reckon.


*approximate classification - even the TRANSWAGGON website doesn't clarify things...

More on the old InterRegio cars...

Following on from the last exciting episode....

The Re 460 was tested, and somewhat unexpectedly, it runs smooth as. I'm impressed, and pleasantly surprised... Obviously it can't haul the whole expanded consist up the grades but I'm very pleased at how well it runs.

I painted over the '2000' logo on the front ends with my 'go-to' SBB red, which was picked up fairly randomly from a model shop in another city a year or so ago. Despite this, it's a perfect match for the Re 460 red straight out of the bottle.

It also seems that the 'chrome SBB directional arrows on the nose' are only appearing on refurbished Re 460s. This program is ongoing as I type this and very few locos had been completed when the Gotthard base tunnel opened, so that's a task I don't have to attempt for this one.

As for the 'old school' green-stripe passenger cars, after reviewing some pics, it was decided that the cream coloured sides on the Marklin models should be painted white. The green is also a little dark for my liking, but as often happens with photograph, in different light the real things seem close to the very dark green (almost black) on the models, so I can live with that. 

So I attempted to carefully paint white over the cream, starting with the roof stripe above the windows.

I wasn't crazy about how neatly this turned out, so for my second attempt, used strips cut from white decal paper over all bits except for the red-logo/SBB/CFF/FFS markings on the side.

Despite being very fiddly with tiny thin strips, with much cursing and rework it turned out ok - certainly good enough when viewed from the mandated distances in Z scale. In the blurry pic taken below you can see the comparison between the cream colour in the upper car (I've painted the end bits white and painted and decaled the roof stripe) and a fully decaled car below (taken before the large decal patches had set smooth). Close enough I reckon.

A final touch was the addition of the very thin black stripe along the white sides (something I had never noticed on the prototype until looking at these pics up close!), which was added with a .05 black pigment marker. This should have a gap with some lettering in it, but I just did the stripe and reckon that looks ok.