Scattered Thoughts . . .

W hen we arrived back from Saratoga on Sunday, the new couplers for the trolley had arrived so I immediately opened the package to see whether I could make these new couplers work on my trolley.  I'm sort of mixing and matching here with this coupler project. I had to do some adapting to make these new couplers work but I think they are okay.  If I'm going to nitpick, I'd say I need to move the couplers a little deeper into the gearboxes but they should work fine as they are now.  I also should blend the paint between the couplers and the gearboxes a bit better.   These new couplers are offset couplers that are made to drop the height of the coupler down a bit.  The straight couplers I had installed last week were too high to couple with other trains.  Now these couplers match the height of my other trains.  The ridiculousness of this is that I'll probably never couple another train car to my trolley.   I've been feeling so lousy that a ...

A fter building and installing new front and rear bumpers on my large scale trolley, I felt that these new bumpers were a bit bare for being so large so I went on a search for detail parts that would make sense in this situation and fit on these bumpers. The first thing I knew I should add is an air tank on the rear bumper.  This would be an air tank (or auxiliary air tank) for the brakes so it would make sense that it would be located on the rear bumper.  Many small switching diesels (Plymouths) had rear mounted air tanks so that was the logical place to put one on my trolley.   Unfortunately, it turns out that finding a tank in the size I needed was a problem.   I wasn't finding anything in F scale which is what I needed.  Since I needed only a small tank, I tried finding a tank in smaller scales.  Unfortunately, I didn't find any G scale tanks that would look right.  I tried O scale but most of those would be ridiculously small.  I ev...

Replacing a coupler... If you've been following this blog lately, you know that I built a small HO scale model railroad for our grandson for Christmas. When he opened up his wrapped trains, I quickly realized that the flatcar did not come with the couplers installed. The couplers were included in the box but they were not installed. Before Lukey came to the house again to play with his trains, I installed these couplers. It was a quick and easy project. Easy peasy. Unfortunately, at some point during his next train session, a tiny spring popped out of one of the couplers on this flatcar and it no longer held a mating coupler and his train kept coming apart. I ordered some cheap generic replacement couplers... they arrived the other day... and, today, I decided it was a good day to install these new couplers. (I'm having a rather lousy health day so it is a good day for tiny, quick tasks rather than any projects.)   After removing the broken coupler, I quickly realiz...