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...

I put together a few comparison "before and after" photos of my large scale trolley and my large scale steam locomotive.  I've been wanting to do this for awhile but never got around to it.  Having just working on the trolley again, I figured it was a good time to capture some "after" photos and then compose "before and after" comparisons. In each comparison photo, the top photo is the train in its stock condition from the factory before I did any work on it while the bottom photo shows the same train after I rebuilt it, repainted it and added details. So, this first comparison photo below is of the trolley.  I purchased the trolley a little over a year ago and immediately started planning for an upgrade and rebuild.  It was not running well when it arrived at my door because the motor had a split gear.  I immediately replaced the motor with Bachmann's replacement drive but, disappointingly and unexpectedly, the brand new assembly still ran quite ...

I captured a few more photos of the trolley this morning and thought I would add them to the blog since they are better than last night's photos. Actually, I wasn't too happy with some of my first photos after working on these steps and the front and rear bumpers.  The light wasn't that great yesterday which made for some mediocre photos.  This morning, the light was a little better in the living room so I captured a few more photos.  This photo, below, is a better shot showing the new bottom step I added.   The next two photos are just better views of the trolley from front and back.  The light on the trolley only lights for the direction it is traveling but, in these photos, I know it appears as though both the front and back headlights are lit all the time.  The front headlight is only lit when in "forward".  The rear headlight is only lit when in "reverse". This last photo is a good photo showing the rear bumper.  I know that these new b...

T his morning, I made quick work of rounding down some sharp edges on the newly installed wood bumpers for my large scale trolley.  Then I put a quick coat of charcoal-ish colored stain.  It is looking much better now! I thought I had blown off all the dust I created by filing and sanding down edges but, clearly, I missed a bunch of dust! I added the bottom step and the triangular-shaped support holding up one end of the bottom step.  I did this on all four of the entries to the trolley.   Maybe tomorrow morning I'll attempt to make four grab bars for next to each of the sets of steps.   I'm waiting on some detail parts for this little detailing project to arrive.  I ordered an air tank for the rear bumper but it might be too large.  If so, I'll need to find a smaller one.  I'm also waiting on a horn and coupler gearboxes.  The coupler gearboxes will fit in well on these new bumpers.  I'm still not sure where to place the horn ...

I did some more work on my large scale trolley yesterday and today.  This is the same trolley we have on our mantle for Christmas.  I've never really been happy with the rounded front and rear bumpers that this trolley ships with and I felt the trolley was missing a step for passengers stepping up from the street so I went about trying to resolve those problems today.   First, I started making the front and rear bumpers to replace the rather toy-like bumpers.  Well, actually, I started by cutting off the front and rear rounded bumpers.  The original front bumper can be seen in the first photo below.  Then I designed a new bumper to be made using wood.  I wanted a chunkier narrow gauge look so I used wood for this.  Anyway, the photo below shows the front rounded, hollow bumper that I cut off... Below, is a photo of the new bumpers being glued up... Below is a photo of the front end after I cut off the manufactured front bumper.  I could...

A s I do every Christmas, I set up a six foot section of train track on our mantle.  I usually have my O scale trains on two tracks set up here for Christmas.  These are Lionel-sized trains.  This year, however, I decided to set up my newly completed large scale trolley (F scale) on the mantle which is more than double the size of those O scale trains. This trolley I've set up on the mantle is the one I just finished rebuilding this summer for our new garden railroad.  It is really a pretty nice model now that I completely rebuilt it.  The beauty of this train is that is it wireless which means I don't have to fuss with keeping the track clean...  there is no need for a power pack or transformer...  there are no wires...  there is no need to deal with finding a nearby outlet.  I placed the track on the mantle and then placed the trolley on the tracks...  that's it...  ready to go.   I ran it back and forth a few times to m...

I had previously written about painting and weathering the new skirting that I had added to the trolley and mentioned that I wanted to do something about repainting the roof next.  I didn't really care for that molded-in cream with a slight green tint color of the roof (top photo at right).  It definitely appeared rather toy-like to me so I wanted to paint it to change the color to something more realistic.   My plan was to chose a color, mix the paint myself to attain the desired color and then paint the roof.  Upon looking more closely at the roof and some of the details that were installed on the roof, I realized that I would need to remove these details first so I removed the pantograph and then removed the wood plank walkways.  I always knew I wanted to make these plastic walkways appear as though they are wood so I figured I would need to remove them at some point anyway.  I originally wasn't thinking I need to remove them to paint the roof but ...

I 've been feeling rather lousy the past few days....  maybe COVID again or maybe a cold with all the symptoms that go with each...  so I've been doing a little work on the trolley between naps.  It's been raining steadily most of this time so I've been stuck inside the house anyway.  This allowed me a bit of time to go back to working on my large scale trolley for our garden railroad.  The new motor block that I added to the trolley about a month ago is slightly taller than the original motor block which changes the appearance of this trolley.  Even before adding this motor block, I was never all that happy with the way the trolley appeared to just teeter on the four wheels near the center of the trolley.  I felt like it looked like the trolley was set upon an upside-down triangle.  Raising the body of the trolley up slightly to fit this new motor block made this odd look even more noticeable.  I figured that adding some skirting to the unde...