DalaGStanator's Customs, Mods and Experiments

Yesterday, I got round to painting the cylinders, boiler, cab and tender in the livery I've chosen. I initially wanted a darker green, but it looked too close to the generic black and I wanted to see what I would get from mixing green and gold. If anything, the result ended up looking like if LNER Apple Green had been adopted after Flying Scotsman's tour. I numbered it 226 in reference to February 26, the date of the first post it appeared in. The handwritten digits are inconsistent and don't look good enough, so they will likely be replaced with printed digits when further details are added.



After soldering all the wires for the lights and on/off button to the battery compartment, I was able to cram them into the boiler and glue the whole body to the chassis. While doing so, I had to ensure the wheels would never hit the running board and the light feature would still function; the position of the wires affected the positive terminal's connection, and slight movements interrupted the power. They fit in so well that only two of them can be (barely) seen over the rearmost wheels (when looking really hard). At one point, the negative terminal changed its angle during soldering and the battery couldn't stay in place. Even then, it no longer sits firmly and often causes the headlamp to flicker when moving. Nevertheless, I'm glad it works how I imagined and I could use intentionally loose connections if I'll ever need flickering without a circuit board/special LED.

The not so good part? The whole boiler and smokebox are now leaning to the left and it only looks good facing right. While the powered tender worked fine pushing the 2-6-0 chassis without the body, it was completely unable to do it with the locomotive assembled; it ran well on the black track on its own (as before), but the loco caused it to derail all the time (likely due to the stability problem, the pony truck hitting the cylinders or the loco to tender drawbar design). Rather than trying to fix the problems, it left me disappointed enough to remove the drive unit from the tender and leave it unpowered (with only the lights remaining). Might reuse the high torque DU for another diesel electric, mainly due to its loud gearing.