Received my new tenders Sat. and sat down to take a break from the ship biulding to start wiring for the S-! Northern. Was testing the mechanism when I experienced a sieze up which was due to a wheel out of quarter. Now the one problem with the Bmann 4-8-4 mech. is the way that the wheels are mounted. A sleeve on the plastic gears accepts a quarter axle from each wheel. This is the weak point of the older Bmanns and the cause of wheel wobble and binding, sometimes so serious as to actually kink the drive rod. Knowing the issue from prior experience I also knew that this mech. was dead in the water. And if one was cracked I probably already had another or was close. So plan B went into effect although it was most of the day to get it done. That was slide an older J mechanism under the boiler. However it does require some trimming even though the J is a little shorter. I actually came out better since the J has closer driver diameter than the standard 4-8-4. Did have a slight issue at first with the trailing truck position, however a quick look at the Baldwin builders photo showed that the cab was clearly behind the trailing truck. So I'm letting it be. In the process now of having to build up a drawbar post and cab floor, but I'm close. Photo of the drive rods for the old chassis. And in the rear was the sacrificial victim. My fantasy scheme NP A-6 Northern that was actually proposed but never built for NP. This will probably live again when I get a new J for the chassis.
Well I'll say that Bmann has come a long way since back when especially the tenders and the newer release locos. This is what I found today when I opened up one of my tenders, a vandy, to install some wires. Since I had to fabricate a new drawbar post for the re-motored S-1 shell I needed to bring some wires to the motor since the drawbar post is styrene. And these are the micro/mini connectors I'm going to be using for some of the older stuff. and a close up of them. The black tubes are heat shrink tube that comes in the package. I am also playing around with the idea of trying to fabricate a split drawbar post for older stuff that only has one rail pick-up or no tender pick-up at all like the early version of the J that I'm working with now. I'm going to do a little shopping on the WWW after the evenings repast to see if they make half round brass tube and in a small enough size. If not I just may have to split my own. That way the only wires I have to run would be some short ones from the motor to the drawbar post. Then the newer tenders could just be hooked up with no fuss and I'll probably be ordering some more of the newer stuff
"Well everyso often it clouds up and rains on the project. " So true....but we usually figure out how to fix it, that's one of the cool things about the hobby. Man those steamers are alot more complicated than diesels. Kinda makes me glad I'm a '90's era modeller .
In the book The First Northerns by Thomas Dressler the Baldwin Locomotive Works proposed an updated and more modern 4-8-4 to the NP around the end of WW2. A design was worked up and a representation of that is in the book. It is described as a cross between a SP Daylight and a UP FEF. It would have had an all weather cab and the tender from a Z-8 behind it. If you can come up with the smokebox front from a Daylight, graft on a all weather cab from something, or modify a cab, and add a Challenger tender then essentially you have the loco as proposed by Baldwin. Way back when I did this I was more heavy into NP steam, had this book, and a perfectly good N&W J. I added a set of airhorns and a Loewy paint job. Quite a few locos were proposed and drawn up and never built at the end of WW2. Not quite a fantasy loco afterall. An old poor quality photo of what it was before it became the power for a GN S-1.
Hooked up the wiring in the S-1 to the tender. White holes seen in rear of new cab floor are for the wires from the motor. Keeps them away from the drawbar. Excess wire is in tender so I can separate tender and loco by about 1.5 inch for any work. Normally when I replace a coal load with an oil bunk I either shave the coal load off or cut it out and place styrene in the opening. Then the oil bunk sits on that. This coal load slides out when the front of the tender is removed. Decided to flip it over and see if it would slide back in. It did so it was just trim the bunk to size and glue it on the underside of the coal load. Plenty of clearance on the tender circuit board. Now can change from coal to oil at the flip of a hat so to speak. And the finished product with a coat of gloss ready for decals. This fella has been a bear but worth it. I'll never see any models of this in N scale unless somebody else does a build. There were only 5 or 6 built before the GN went to the S-2. Great locos for GN since these big guys had quite a bit more tractive effort than the S-2 and were great dual service locos. Mostly used to pull the hotshot fruit trains while the P-2 and S-2 held down the passenger and mail.
