I rather like my old Dublo and Triang models as you may have guessed if you've read anything prior to this. They look reasonably the part (they are at least the right colour and shape) and run well, more important however is their tinkerability. By this I mean you can strip one down no problem, re-assemble it with a modicum of care and, due to the lack of bits, 95% of the time it will run as well as the day it was made.
I decided to have a decent running session tonight on my On30 American narrow gauge layout (my main modelling concern at the moment). Everything was fine until it came to move the Bachmann railbus out of the station. It didn't, just sitting there whirring away. The final drive had gone phut.
My first fear was stripped gears, bachmann US models tend to have this affliction, due to the gear material but I'd never heard of it in this model. I opened the gearbox up and found the final drive gears had so much sideways play in them they had both disengaged, why they took so long to do this I don't know.
My solution was to slip card packing between gear and casing to keep it in mesh, this worked but now the drive was too tight and the thing struggled to move. Out came the card, but now it was making a nasty noise so I tried to remove the gearbox, failed halfway, put it back in and now it was making a truly terrifying buzzing noise.
Nothing for it, a total strip down was necessary. I dug out the exploded parts drawing and was amazed at the complexity of the thing. In the end I just started dismantling as I found it. Eventually I got to the motor casing and found the cause of the issue, I'd bent the motor tail shaft and the flywheel was now executing a spectacularly wobbly arc. I bent it back as best I could and re-assembled. It now runs as smoothly as before but any more than a scale 10 mph and the thing buzzes like a circular saw, I decided to cut my losses and leave it at that as I never run it fast anyway. I'm contemplating taking the Xuron track snippers to the shaft and just doing away with it altogether.
Detail is lovely, and this railbus has lots of it, however it makes getting the thing apart without damage impossible and I do like to have a model with ease of maintenance. I can't see models of the day running in 50 years time if the mechanisms are as awkward to look after as this one is, as people simply won't! The possible exception is the On30 mogul by Bachmann, that is a very robust model, and is part of the reason 3 of my loco's are based on them.
Dublo got it right it seems.....
