Nothing to see here

I'm away in distant lands doing 'field research' again.

Alas, I was a long way from the real (and my model) Wassen, but here is a recent pic of a semi-topical Re 6/6 at St Saphorin just to prove that I'm still alive.

More on my Flickr (warning: it is mainly mainly RhB of late, a probable next project after Wassen)

My normal intermittent service here may resume in about three weeks.

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.