Toned down tanks

As you may recall in a previous post, the twins had pretty bright paint for a humble little copper mining railroad set in Arizona's Sonoran Desert.

Since that time, they were toned down a bit by applications of chalk:

Details added to the twins include operating link and pin coupler drawheads on the front pilots, and drawbars on the rear (just like on the prototype Porter locos). All of my On30 equipment on the E&SG operates with link and pin couplers.

Smokebox doors have detailed overlays with the correct H.K. Porter lettering, custom number boards with etched brass numbers, and smokebox extensions. Headlights are equipped with MV Lenses (#402) with the foil removed from the back center of each lens, permitting the surface mount LED in the headlights to shine through realistically. The lenses are an improvement over the stock clear lenses, which display the unsightly square yellow LEDs when the headlights are not lit.

#3 received her name on custom nameplates mounted on the wood paneled cab inserts.

Additional improvements include a bell rope, and almost 2 ounces of additional weight between the cylinders, in the sand dome, and in the cab.

An engineer sitting on a wood seatbox, a scratchbuilt coal scoop, and a TCS KA1 keep alive unit under the roof complete the cab.

#4 has similar details in the cab, although of course a different character behind the throttle! Here she is simmering in the heat at Apache Wells.

The Sidewinder is just a bit newer than her older sister, and it shows in the brighter shade of paint on the tanks. Like the real Coronado Railroad in Arizona's copper country, the E&SG tended to order their Porters in pairs...perhaps receiving some modest discount in the process. Unfortunately, #4 was damaged in shipping just after leaving the Porter factory in Pittsburgh, and was delayed getting to her new home in the desert while repairs were completed. The snake names were a custom used by other railroads in the area including the Coronado Railroad, and are not just a poetic flourish...note the reptile slithering towards #4 in the foreground!

Together, the pair will work hauling copper from the Estrella Incline and Sonora Grande mines. and whatever other chores required.

Here is a profile shot showing off #4's classic lines. The bell rope is tan ship rigging thread, stiffened with ACC after application to the model. The letter boards were printed on thin cardstock. My thanks to fellow Arizona On30 Desperado David Meek, who suggested that approach over the decals that didn't turn out as well as hoped.

The engineer escapes the hot desert sun, but must still endure that boiler simmering a few feet away. He's awaiting  the next call for #4 to pick up some ore loads high above on the Estrella Incline.

These locomotives were a lot of fun to do...and another pair, #5 and #6, are coming off the workbench in about a week. Stay tuned for more 'Portermania' to come!

@ Verne

Nice job! To top it off how about a video of the pair hard at work?  Do they have sound?

Den

Great idea

Den, I have a new camera that is supposed to have great video recording capabilities...I need to finish some changes in a few scenes on the layout and I will capture them working! They both have Tsunami sound and run great.

Lovely job

Great looking locos. We'll done Verne

Questions

Verne,

Inspired by your Estrella and Sonora Grande and Dave Meeks' Thunder Mountain Mining Company, I have been planning an On30 desert railroad for myself. Naturally, having decided to head that direction, I immediately purchased a Bachmann 0-4-2 Porter to play with. It's the first sound equipped model I have owned. (I was previously horsing around in HOn30.) I have been running it back and forth on a single length of HO flex track treated with graphite. So far it moves along nicely, only exhibiting hesitation after I take it off the track to fool with it.

I did notice that when I subjected it to a balance test that the weight was greatly biased towards the rear. Have you ever checked the balance on the 0-4-0 version? I wonder because it seems to me a more reliable electrical contact might result from having the weight evenly distributed over the drivers. And the 0-4-0 doesn't have the coal bunker hanging out there on the back and so might be more easily brought into balance. This might help me decide on which version will become #2.

I have been addressing this on my 0-4-2; I packed the balloon stack with tungsten, added running boards made of lead, added lead to the underside between the wheels and filled the general area between the steam cylinders also with lead. This all brought it barely to a fair balance. I am fooling around with replacing the pilot with lead also...this ought to throw things a bit forward and allow adding lead to the cab to bring things back into balance. Anyway, a fair amount of fussing around.

As I said, it runs a whole three feet backwards and forwards reliably. It's been about out a month now, with the longest unused stretch being a week. It sounds, however, that your experience indicates that these little beasties are going to need help to run reliably on a layout. Would that be fair characterization? I'm sort of loathe to add a tender to the back of the 0-4-2; sort of spoils the charm for me.

I guess that I'm asking if you think there is chance in hell that I can get them to run reasonably well without keep-alive technology or not?

Thanks,

David Stewart

Yes

David, short answer is yes - but the odds are stacked against you, and all of us who expect bullet-proof electrical contact for DCC with sound in these little locos.

Adding weight is the first step, you are right to add as much as possible, especially forward. I have always suspected that the physics of our small locomotives being what they are, that balancing a locomotive is not nearly as critical for the model as it was for the real thing, but it couldn't hurt either. Since I use link and pin couplers that mount forward of the pilot, I can steal the space needed for the front coupler and add lead weights behind the pilot. I have added sheet lead inside the ceiling of cabs, and moldable lead in the sand dome cavity left from removal of the factory capacitor (if I add a KA1 or KA2 capacitor). I agree I hate adding tenders to these little critters, I have been successful adding a KA1 under the ceiling on my 0-4-0s with the full cab (notice they don't have the more typical plantation steel cab, for this reason). Wired to simply replace the existing capacitor, the KA will only keep the sound card alive, it won't pick up the motor if it stalls. However, most dropouts don't seem to effect the motor nearly as often as the decoder. So, I am not going towards bullet-proof on these locos, just reducing the likelihood of dropouts. My brass 0-6-0Ts have space for KA2s and run very reliably if I use graphite on the rails.

Tricks to improve performance of these 0-4-0T or 0-4-2T Porters, in rough order of importance:

1. Weight, weight and more weight
2. Clean track treated with a graphite block
3. Keep Alive
4. Powered frogs (not an option for those of us running small locos, every potential failure point should be eliminated or minimized and powered frogs work better than unpowered!)

I have found the more I run the locos, the better they run. On a related note, I have found cleaning the wheels by running the loco on graphite-treated track (running against a bumper post) works better than trying to clean the wheels and contacts. Scratching of the tires doesn't seem to be a problem with the graphite there, and the simple physical contact with the wipers, drivers and rails is enough to keep the wheels clean without removing the loco from the layout.

This is an imperfect science, but with these factors working in your favor, you should be able to run reliably on DCC, experiencing few dropouts.

Thank You

Never let it be said I'm not a pest. A couple more questions:

Have you ever heard/seen anyone who added wipers to the trailing truck of the 0-4-2? It seems possible that if one employed, say, a leading truck spring to create firm contact that this might be helpful, although I must admit that I am fairly leery of my electrical and soldering skills. (Which is why I will avoid the capacitor solution if I can.)

On the 0-4-0 it looks to me that you had to cut down the chimney on your boiler to accommodate the keep-alive unit. Is that correct? My guess is that the foggy windows is more for concealment than for ambiance. I am really digging the look of the plantation style cab...which has me leaning toward getting another 0-4-2 for my second loco.(I have myself believing that I will only need the two loco's for my proposed layout. A little self-delusion never hurts.) If creating a plantation style cab on the 0-4-0 is going to make necessary surgery obvious then that might settle my waffling as to which style will be my next roster addition.

Thanks very much for your attention.

David Stewart

It's a challenge

It's a challenge adding additional contact...see my thread on the On30 Line about how I attempted wipers coming off of brake rigging between the drivers, and how that turned out. The problem with the trailing truck, it's very light and not sprung against the rails, and will add little. I have found the existing contacts work 95% of the time, and KA will get you to 100.

You are on to my tricks, David...the windows and heavy cab conceal the KA unit, and the cut-down steam dome. I would love to have a few Porters with plantation cabs, even have the parts, but am not clear how to hide the KA in this case. People modeling northern prototypes have it made, they can do a closed cab with a rear bunker extension to hide the KA, but for southwestern modelers, we need a tender or magic!

Looking Good, Verne!

Wonderful job on the "twins" ... real "eye catchers".  Thanks for sharing.

Thanks again.

Thank you again, Verne. 

And I agree...you've done a wonderful job on the porters!

David Stewart

Tomar Locomotive Pick Up Shoes

Have you tried the Tomar Locomotive Pick Up Shoes? I have used them on several different small loco's in HO so they should work well on On30 locos too. I blacken them with Blacken-It and they are barely visible.

@ Verne

Do you have another KA not installed that you could place outside the cab so that we can get an idea how large it is?  I might have an idea for using a plantation style cab with the KA.  However, I need to see how big it is.

Den

Pickup Shoes

Graeme, thanks for your suggestion...I fiddled with pickup shoes several years ago. Several problems there...the locos are so light, it is difficult to get the shoes to make contact with the rails without causing the rear drivers to lift.

Here is a pair of brass brake assemblies, to which I soldered Tomar pickup shoes after wiring them and isolating them with a styrene shaft.

In theory, this would improve contact, right? Instead, the wipers were too stiff for the light weight of the locomotive...they tended either to not make contact, or to actually lift the drivers on high spots where there was vertical transitions (the start of grades, etc.). I found them more trouble than they were worth, and abandoned the pickup shoes. I unsoldered them from the brake gear.

Again, it SHOULD have worked in a perfect world, but with my less-than-ideal vertical transitions, it caused the rear driver to hang up, causing the front drivers to spin. So, they worked in the sense they improved pickup, but sabotaged operation of a railroad that has stiff grades and nasty transitions. Lesson learned, but this could work on less vertical track if the conditions were right. You can read all about this on my website under the Workbench section if you are interested in the full details.

And, speaking of details, I have not added brake shoe detail to my other Porters...hmmm, I should probably do that! These are Precision Scale parts, forget the numbers, but they are easily added between the drivers...and as long as they are electrically isolated and don't interfere with the driver tires, they are a nice added detail.

It's hard to see the brake detail down there, but it's really there! Here's my final solution, a KA2 capacitor and extra pickups in a small tender, built on a Bachmann passenger truck. The step by step is in a previous blog entry.

This loco is very reliable, and my favorite small Porter. It is heavy...the cab is a sanded down stock cab with a sheet lead roof and foil sides, with rivet decals applied. Additional lead weight was added to the smokestack, behind the front pilot and between the cylinders, and in the sand dome (in the cavity where the stock capacitor is located).

Den, I don't have the KA1 and 2 that I can photograph next to a Porter, but the dimensions are available on the TCS site. The KA2 just barely fits in the length of the tender tank, with resin tank walls of about 1/8" each end. As I see it, the options for an 0-4-2T are:

1. KA1: tuck it on the fireman's side of the cab against the cab wall, paint black
2. KA1: insert against the cab roof ceiling, but it will be visible unless sunshades or other trickery is performed to hide or disguise the capacitor.
3. KA2: Will fit on top of the existing coal bunker, wood boards could be used to make an 'extension' to carry more coal...it would be pretty high, but the roof of the cab could be extended over the rear bunker like a Forney, and it could be made to look good. For northern climates, an all-weather cab would easily conceal the KA2 in this location, but that only works where it is cold.
4. A small tender to carry the KA2. I haven't included tenders with most of my Porters, because I don't like how they look, the loco looks much better on its own with some small cars coupled. Besides a tender, a small caboose or ore car could be used, but again it takes away from the tiny appearance of these teakettles having something permanently coupled to them.
5. Whatever you or others can come up with, I am open to any and all practical suggestions!

Two more for the road

In related news, the last two remaining Porters on the E&SG roster, #5 and #6, were spotted today at Apache Wells:

Observant followers of Porter lore will immediately ask, where did those huge diamond smokestacks come from?

Read on...

 #5, the Sonora, still needs lots of work...custom cab with details, weight, Keep Alive, and I have to hide the decal film! But here's a start, with link and pin draw head, number board and modified headlight lens installed.

 Here is the lens, an MV Lens #402...it looks so much better than the clear Bachmann lenses that show off the ugly surface mount LED in the headlight. If you look closely at the center of the lens, you can see where I sanded away the silver foil backing, to allow light from the LED to fill the lens.

 Here is the headlight lit...nice effect, too bright for the old oil or acetylene lamps, but a nice touch nonetheless.

 Here is venerable #6, the Estrella. Again, still much to do, but the family resemblance is hard to miss. People will probably either love or hate the large diamond stacks!

 Here is #6 in profile, showing off her outrageous proportions! The word is, the superintendent of motive power knows more than the experts at Porter, and never thought the stacks they provided did enough to extinguish or break up cinders before they exited the stack. An 'old school' kind of guy, he had these put on the more powerful 0-4-2s to prove his point. The jury is still out, but those of us who like diamond stacks will like the touch...they certainly don't look like a typical Porter!

This concludes the 'Portermania' for now...I will pick up work on these after completing scenes on the layout, there is much to to to make up for lost time!

Love the stacks

They really give those engines a distinctive look. Excellent choice!

And lots of room for weight!

David Stewart

More on pick up shoes

The ones you show in your pics are totally different to the type I was using. see pic below. I used these on a Grandt Line 25 ton boxcab loco and the difference was very significant. These are Tomar # 804.

Tomar Shoes

I apologize, Verne, for turning your post about your prides and joys into a thread about electrical reliability.

I am not so remorseful, however, as to not add this to my crimes:

it looks like those Tomar shoes, depending on their overall size, thickness and malleability, might provide a very simple to install set of pickups.

One picture being worth a thousand words: 

It looks like if formed and sized correctly, they could be slid into place between that "sandwich" (which I also show exploded for clarity) and Bob's your uncle...pick up shoes!

David Stewart

Love the new Porters

Love the new Porters, Verne. It looks like the E&SG is living high on the hog! Did they discover a rich new vein in those desert hills? Them fancy paint jobs is an expense. Just ask the TMMC accountants. 

Brilliant Verne

Just delightful

Kenn down under

E&SG Porters

Verne, very nice looking Porters and layout as well.  I especially liked the red on the front number boards.

Dennis, are you building a layout based on the Morenci Southern?  I am doing the same, with a bit of Coronado & Shannon as well,  would love to talk more about your plans.

Mike Conder, Highlands Ranch, CO

Those Porter Stacks ...

... look pretty close to the ones used by the Coronado on their later locos, really like them.  Where did you find them?
 

Mike Conder

@ Mike and Verne

First to Verne, please forgive me for the slight hijacking of your thread while I answer Mike.

Mike, to answer your question, yes I'm modeling the Morenci Southern Railway as much as I can the way it was in 1912. I have two threads going on the MRH forums. One is on the research, advice, good suggestions and excellent sources of information. The other is new and based on the building of the MS.

http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/18299

http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/19405

Guys like Verne have contributed a lot to my discussions. I really appreciate their contributions to my fun. If you have not gone to Verne's website I encourage you to go. He has a section full of humorous stories that he has written about his railroad. Verne is also one you can learn a lot from.

My first exposure to incline mining came from Verne. I lived in Arizona before, explored all over and went to places like Flagstaff and Thumb Mountain, but I never saw an incline railway or the remains of the ROW. Now I have learned those are common in the early 1900s all over Arizona.

If you get a chance to look, Verne's friend Dave Meeks is also involved in On30 modeling. He is creating the Thunder Mesa Mining a Company. You have to look at that one. In my opinion it's guys like Verne and Dave that are keeping the "fun" in model railroading. They are doing it their way and I commend them for it.

Den

Diamond stacks

Mike, thanks...the diamond stacks are Bachmann On30 Heisler stacks with brass extensions added (to raise them above the bells). Their proportions are close to what's on the ACC's 0-4-4T in Clifton. That was a more powerful loco than my little 8-tonners, but it's more for the fun looks than absolute prototypical realism. Just don't want to go too far to the 'caricature' level, hopefully I have avoided that.

Den, no worries, and thanks for the compliment! Mike is a kindred spirit...

What about the other On3 Desperados?

Who are they and what are they modeling?

Den