HR54 Design Changes

Yankee Tank in sidings at CD0GG Running Day

I took my Yankee Tank, though far from complete, to the Carlisle Club (CD0GG) on Saturday to the November Running Day for her first run in a club layout situation. The engine hadn't run very smoothly on my test track at home so before I went to the running day I removed the inside motion which I hoped would help matters. It didn't seem to help much however and I was rather less than pleased with her performance on the club layout, though she negotiated the curves and turnouts easily enough, running was simply not as smooth as I was aiming for. There was some discussion among the members present about the relative merits of fitting a flywheel, I'm much in favour of this, an advocate of the flywheel in fact, as I think it does much to improve performance. However there was no room for a flywheel in this case because the gearbox was mounted on the rear axle and the M1824 motor sat upright in the boiler.

As I'd already removed the inside motion from the front axle (it's hardly noticeable anyway) I decided that a radical design change was feasible; I would mount the gearbox on the front axle, forget the inside motion and fit a flywheel.

In the process of doing this I noticed that the motor when mounted horizontally on the axle was skewed to one side, I thought at first this was due to a faulty gearbox but found on closer investigation that the problem lay with the front axle, it was not square in the chassis, it was out of true, in fact it was askew! So...I stripped the chassis down and remedied the fault with the aid of my invaluable Hobby Holidays chassis jig.

On reassembly in its new form, with axles running true and complete with flywheel, I found that the chassis ran very smoothly both forwards and backwards, round the curves and over the points and crossings. It remains only to fit the new configuration into the superstructure which involves a few minor alterations...I think.

Though I've sacrificed the inside motion to the flywheel I think it worthwhile; I can still model the visible part of the inside works in front of the motion plate, which hardly move anyway. All I have for this however is a pair of rather long spindly valve rods, I doubt that in reality that this was the full story but I've no further information to go on.

Tractor Story... Update.

I ordered a Dragon Models Cambrian Railway machinery wagon to carry my Farmall tractor which features in the post below. When the wagon kit duly arrived it looked very nice indeed; but on reading the accompanying description of the wagon I realised that these wagons were sent for scrap in the 1920s before my tractor was even built, the Farmall being introduced in the 1930s! So now I have a wagon without a load and a tractor still without a wagon.