Weekend Update 4/2/23

[robert3985]

Here's how I spent Friday, with a break to clear the snow from my driveway, most of the night, and this morning...

Photo (1) - The shipment arrived! I wondered if it would since there was a foot of snow on the driveway Friday morning:



Photo (2) - Printer and Wash & Cure assuming room temperature while I clear the driveway:



Photo (3) - My ex-reloading bench, where my old Photon and old Wash & Cure were stationed...ready for the new equipment!



Photo (4) - Unpacking the new 10" 8K printer!  I struggled to carry all 50 lbs of it down my stairs to the paint shop/machining room because the box was so big it was hard to hang on to!



Photo (5) - All set to go after testing, bed leveling, LCD checking and finally finding how to see what firmware version it has!


Hopefully my resin will show up today and I'll be doing the first test print after I warm it up!

Cheerio!
Bob Gilmore

[sirenwerks]

(Attachment Link)
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/715778/

The Robe River unit in the first picture has a peculiar angle on the cab side. Do the CN units have the same or is that an Aussie thing?

[Dayliner]

My standard joke is that, every time I visit Tim's layout, I want to come home and burn mine . . .

Dave

I know the feeling, Dave, but so far I've managed to control the impulse.  I figure that if I spend enough time helping Tim on his layout, some of the magic is bound to rub off on me!

I'm getting near completion of my Lake Cowichan rebuild.  The major, and tedious, job this week was prepping the west end fascia to receive the five servo controllers.  It was an unwelcome lesson in the folly of trying to get a job done quickly. A number of the holes were not properly aligned and I had to plug them and then carefully locate and drill new holes.  Here, the holes have all been drilled, and you can see where I've had to repair the earlier hasty work.



Then it was time to test fit the fascia.  Here it is installed, with controllers in place.  This was a significant milestone moment for the railway--the first time that all the upper-level turnouts have been controlled from fascia-mounted controllers (before, you had to reach under the deck to line the Blue Points).



Then everything came down again for priming and painting.  Since it was a sunny day, I took it out to the back deck to get the primer coat on.  The narrow strip in the middle in the new backdrop for Wellcox, below Lake Cowichan.  It is taller than the current backdrop, and will hide the brackets that support Lake Cowichan.

[chuck geiger]

Staging structures...

[u18b]

Well.... I thought I had bought a lemon.



Everything was locked up.

Turned out that the reason it was locked up was not a flaw in the mechanism (though it had some problems)....

but PAINT.   Whoever owned this must have used a rattle can of primer and then a rattle can of oily black.

Because underneath all that globs and globs of paint was a nice version 1 Shay.



Lots of tuning and correcting still to do.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

This thing makes my Bluford cars look small.

I present... The Conrail Museum! Now open in Shippensburg PA.

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[mandealco]

The Robe River unit in the first picture has a peculiar angle on the cab side. Do the CN units have the same or is that an Aussie thing?

The Robe River RSC-3 has an export clearance cab.  They are quite different from the CN RSC-13's.  The CN units are essentially an RS-1 with 3-axle trucks and have the 6-cylinder 539 engine at 1000hp.  The RSC-3 has a V-12 244 engine at 1600hp.  Location of the stacks are the giveaway.  Similar but different.
Cheers
Steve

[brokemoto]

Middle axle removed and the short drop equalizers replaced with a longer one to span the gap between axles. CN did the same with a number of their RDC-13's in the late 1960's, with all returned to A-1-A configuration in the early 1970's.

Thank you for the photograph.  At least CN properly replaced the trucks.  One of the Piedmont roads had several RSC-2s that worked the orange harvests in Florida.  The railroad had them equipped with steam generators and signalling devices so that they could protect passenger schedules other times of the year.  The reason for the A-1-A trucked power was that the locomotives and cars used to run on the prototypical equivalent of SNAP-TRAK right into the orchards.  Crummy track required the six-axle trucks.  At some point, the railroad took a torch and simply cut out the idler axle bearings and removed the idler wheelset.  The railroad continued to operate them with the hacked up truck.  Idda' thunk that this would cause even worse problems, but, whuddoiknow?

 Re: Weekend Update 4/2/23
« Reply #7 on: Yesterday at 04:43:59 PM »

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The Robe Loco is an RSC-3 Built by MLW in the early 50's for the New South Wales Government Railways.  This one ended up in Western Aussie on the iron ore railroads.
Cheers
Steve

MLW construction would explain the the RS-1 type B end of that thing.  Its being used in Australia would explain the RS-1 "export" type cab.  ALCo  delivered their first RS-1s to the U.S. roads from 1939-1941.  When the U.S. became involved in World War Two, the War Production Board took all of them, had the special C-C trucks that I previously mentioned swapped in and they were equipped with the "export" type cab that this RS-3 has.  Off these RSD-1s nées RS-1s went to Russia and Persia.  ALCo and MLW built a number of the "export" RSD-1s for the Russians and for use in Persia.   At some point during that war, the WPB did allow ALCo to replace the units that WPB had snatched from the railroads.    I read somewhere that the Russians were building copies of this "export" RSD-1 into the 1980s; they were that good.  The 539 was a pretty good and reliable prime mover.  It simply had reached its peak.

[lock4244]

Thank you for the photograph.  At least CN properly replaced the trucks.  One of the Piedmont roads had several RSC-2s that worked the orange harvests in Florida.  The railroad had them equipped with steam generators and signalling devices so that they could protect passenger schedules other times of the year.  The reason for the A-1-A trucked power was that the locomotives and cars used to run on the prototypical equivalent of SNAP-TRAK right into the orchards.  Crummy track required the six-axle trucks.  At some point, the railroad took a torch and simply cut out the idler axle bearings and removed the idler wheelset.  The railroad continued to operate them with the hacked up truck.  Idda' thunk that this would cause even worse problems, but, whuddoiknow?

Cutting out the idler would increase the individual axle loading, so it's likely they reasoned it wasn't an issue. It's removal would also allow the locomotive to negotiate a tighter radius curve - maybe this was a more pressing requirement? The road you refer to may have not planned to restore the trucks to A-1-A in the future, so gently removing the idler may not have been necessary. On retirement in mid-70's all of CN's RSC-13's donated their A-1-A's to RS-18's.

[nkalanaga]

Brokemoto:  I heard the same story about the Soviets continuing to build RS-1s.  The report I heard said they were exact copies, right down to the Alco markings on the engine block!

[Zack L-J]

Wow is she ever pretty. But I gotta say, the sound is really just kinda *****. I already changed all the CVs to Spook's recommendations and it's drastically less awful than stock, but man, I was expecting a lot more out of such an enormous tender and an expensive loco. I'm gonna look into the speaker mods people have posted on this forum.

[CR4100]

I lived up to the Railwire motto "Ride Height Matters." I used modern technology to solve an ancient problem and lowered some Bachmann 41' high cube box cars. The new frames have holes for a 2-56 truck screw and an 00-90 coupler screw. The inner side has cradles to hold 1/4-oz fishing weights.
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[brokemoto]

Cutting out the idler would increase the individual axle loading, so it's likely they reasoned it wasn't an issue. It's removal would also allow the locomotive to negotiate a tighter radius curve - maybe this was a more pressing requirement? The road you refer to may have not planned to restore the trucks to A-1-A in the future, so gently removing the idler may not have been necessary. On retirement in mid-70's all of CN's RSC-13's donated their A-1-A's to RS-18's.

My thought on the hack job was more toward the weakening of the overall support that the structure of the trucks would render.  I would think that you would get better support if you simply swapped out the A-1-A for B-Bs.  If you needed the longer wheelbase on two axles the smarter move might have been to use new trucks in order to have better support.  If nothing else, you might put a steel rod into the bearings.  I forget where I saw this photograph or even what road.  I just remember that it was one of the Piedmont roads (which would rule out FEC or SOU-although the latter did run through the Piedmont, it was not strictly a Piedmont road).

Most US roads had retired their RS-2/RSC-2 by the mid to late 1960s, even those repowered.



nkalanaga

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Re: Weekend Update 4/2/23
« Reply #24 on: Yesterday at 06:01:31 PM »

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Brokemoto:  I heard the same story about the Soviets continuing to build RS-1s.  The report I heard said they were exact copies, right down to the Alco markings on the engine block!
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N Kalanaga
Be well

(emphases mine)


Given the Soviet mentality, this would not surprise me. 

[packers#1]

This thing makes my Bluford cars look small.

I present... The Conrail Museum! Now open in Shippensburg PA.

Huh, I’ve got a customer in Shippensburg I’ve been meaning to visit. Sounds like I’ve got a great excuse to visit!

In other news, I’ve finally hung the backdrop. Initially I was going to attach it to the wood frame of the layout, but I realized it would be much easier to mount it to the wall. Overall, I’m happy enough with it, and this means I can start making progress on the other bits!

The two GRLW GP40-2W’s (ex-CN) are leading a long train of interchange from Greenville to Belton, destined for the Pickens Railroad and ultimately customers in Anderson.



Here they are spotting a final coil car in the Lakeside Industrial area before continuing to Belton. You can see the plastics cars and coil cars picked up from local customers; the far right track is the spur for Sonoco Packaging, maker of plastic packaging films. Each hopper had to get slotted in the particular sequence for unloading its plastic.



Oof I’ve got to program those headlights!

[rail_nut]

To remove the middle axle, or any axle, on the truck all that is needed is the removal of "tie bar" below the bearing.  One hexagonal bolt at each end. this is to allow ease of maintenance. So four bolts and drop the whole axle assembly.  This way trucks could easily revert back to a A-1-A arrangement when needed. Freight trucks might be different but passenger car and loco trucks basically use the tie bar arrangement.