Stew's Garden Scale Railroad Empire

Our Garden Railroad Empire's Beginnings

I'm having too much fun with this...

Our garden scale "empire" started on the pool deck of our house in Wekiva back in 2013. Back then, all we had were our Christmas presents to each other, no track, and nothing much else. Ann had found a train set advertised in a local "trader" type publication for $50. It was a Bachmann B&O passenger set with the engine, tender, two passenger cars, a bunch of track, and the power pack. The steam engine was missing the popoff valve on the steam dome and one of the piston rods was broken, but everything looked to be in good shape, so we said why not? We were the proud owners of well used garden scale train set!

I slowly started acquiring track and rolling stock, in addition to our Christmas presents to each other and our new Royal Blue set. I started with an oval on just the patio using the 10' diameter Aristocraft stainless steel track. I also snagged a pair of Aristocraft wide radius stainless steel switches and some straights of various lengths. You guessed it... The original switch loop. It just went from there. I tried the loop within a loop, but the switches and crossings I have are two different angles. It appears the switches are roughly 20° (19° perhaps?), but the crossings are 30°. I didn't think it was going to be like the HO scale 18" radius switches that have a little 10° chunk to add to make it fit like a full curve section.

So instead of doing a loop within a loop, I decide to go around the pool with all the new track I have from eBay, sharing the 10' diameter loop on the patio with the new larger loop. Turns out that is too much track to step over, so I decide to just make a siding to park the engine and cars I'm not running around the pool. I've been doing some research on the Bachmann site, trying to find out what they have in the way of spare parts for our engines. Turns out not much. In fact, it's difficult to even find what might be close short of looking through every large scale part. It became so confusing, I had to put together a page with pictures of all the different styles of ten wheeler parts, just to keep it all straight.

Why did I need to keep it straight? Every so often Bachmann will have a sale on replacement parts, and if you have some of the older style engines that use some of the early generation mechanisms, you'll probably want to upgrade them to the latest fifth generation mechanism. Why? They're much more quiet and reliable than the early styles, and chances are eventually you'll have to replace a motor or gearbox in them anyway. Another consideration is the low cost versions' details are generally cheaper plastic parts compared to the anniversary editions' beautiful and shiny metal parts, to to mention the extremely detailed valve gear compared to simplistic plastic pieces.

So when I can get a brand new bottom half, with all metal side rods and valve gear and a brand new mechanism, motor, gearbox and all for $55... Of course I bought one to replace both of the ten wheelers in our iron horse stable at the time. The other thing I picked up was a new tender base with new style sound card and metal wheels, for just $40. Now the old style card in the Royal Blue will be replaced with a new one, not to mention swapping out the plastic wheels for blue painted metal wheels. Now all I need to do is swap the guts from the new green base with full metal side rods and valve gear into the old blue shell.

I already have to take both the old and new ones all apart to swap the blue colored insets with the green ones, but unfortunately the base of the new one is black, not the Royal Blue color, so I'll need to use the old base with the new guts. Simple, right? Wrong. Not only is the new motor mount different, but so is the way the gearbox fits. What starts out as simple minor modification quickly turns into major surgery. Even the driver axle bushings are different. Everything else is just material removal until things fit. The axles are totally different between the two, so although it's material removal until they fit again, they are different sizes and prfoiles on the new one. I do the best I can, but can't get it perfect.

I won't bore you with more details here. Suffice it to say I got it all back together and it runs much better, but could run better yet if I had just used the new bottom shell instead of the original reworked to fit everything. I use this engine as the workhorse for testing and dirty or dangerous conditions since it still isn't anything fancy and I don't much care if it gets hurt or damaged in the process. With a reliable loop of track around the pool, it gets old just watching a train run around the pool and I soon expanded into the side yard, complete with a "wye", a long passing siding, and a water feature.

February 2014

March / April 2014

May 2014