Page 18 - May June 2000

New Motive Power for the “Lone Pine Route”...
Rebuilding and Detailing a Bachmann 2-4-2 Geoff Meek
In early May of 1999, the board of the Sierra & Newton Railroad were holding a meeting, sat round a table in the Empire Hotel, across the street from the depot at Newton.
The subject of the meeting was to discuss the acquisition of new motive power for the railroad. Times were good, the railroad business was booming and the railroad found itself short of a new locomotive. Naturally cost was a prime consideration. They had to look at the profits they would eventually pay the shareholders, so they were not going to spend a fortune!
The railroad had recently introduced a new passenger schedule, with a morning departure to Sierra and an afternoon return working back to Newton. The train was lightly loaded, with two passenger cars plus mail or a boxcar. So rather than tie up one of the line’s ten- wheelers it was decided something smaller would suffice.
Many points were raised on that May afternoon. It was finally decided by the railroad’s President (yours truly) that if they could obtain a second-hand loco at a reasonable price, the rebuilding could be undertaken at the company shops. Well, so much for the fiction - the rest, as they say, is indeed fact!
Some time before May I had obtained a second-hand Bachmann 2-4-2 done out as a wood burner in the Yukon & White
Pass livery. To say it was crude is putting it mildly. However its good point was the
loco chassis. This had been upgraded by Bachmann to their Spectrum specification, new gearing had been introduced and pick-up was from all four wheels plus both trucks.
The crucial point in these 2-4-2’s is the weight distribution for adhesion. As they come, the weight is too far forward, tending to lift the trailing truck and so affecting running. For best results the weight needs to be directly over the driving wheels. Only a limited amount of weight can be added, but it is enough to enable the loco to manage two passenger cars plus a mail car or boxcar on the level. As all my freight and passenger cars are upgraded with metal wheelsets, train weights are greatly increased, so any more cars and the loco is struggling.
The Bachmann model is of a Baldwin prototype built for the Hawaii Railroads at the beginning of the 20th century. One is preserved in the USA, #5 of the ex- Hawaii Railway, built in 1925 and now owned by the Tahoe Trout Lake & Pacific. It has operated on the Cumbres & Toltec, but photos are somewhat difficult to find. After a search through my library I found a couple that gave me the general layout of the loco.
The first task was to decide what to keep and what to scrap. The tender was reduced to the chassis and body. The coal rails, imitation wood load, back-up light, all the hand rails, water tank filler and wheel sets were relegated to the bin! Likewise the loco body was detached
from the chassis, and all associated wiring was removed. The chassis was put to one side to work on later. The loco body was completely stripped, and the hand rails, air pump, bell, stack and cooling racks dispensed with. At this time I decided the loco would be a coal burner.
The cab was also removed. On these locos the cab is large and the easily-seen backhead definitely needs to be detailed, otherwise the loco looks very bare. The boiler splits into two halves allowing you to remove two halves of the footplate, so you are left with the boiler tube and the firebox backhead. The awful green paint was removed without much difficulty, and the stack cut off level with the top of the boiler. All holes for hand rails and other fittings were filled with plastic putty and sanded smooth. New hand rails were fashioned from suitable brass wire. Hand rail knobs were split pins let into new holes drilled in the boiler and secured with superglue (this conversion uses a lot of that.)
A white metal casting of an air pump was fettled up and fitted with all the associated piping. The generator that sits atop of the boiler ahead of the cab was reworked with the air pump connections being fitted. The steam pipes either side of the boiler were made from small diameter plastic tubing, with the new cast white metal valves and handles fitted and arranged to pass through the footplate to connections below.
The condensing racks of both sides were
18 ROUNDHOUSE