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.