The Alco-Garratt.
This is a model of a "could have been" locomotive. The Garratt type was developped by the British company Beyer-Peacock. They saw service almost everywhere in the world, a notable exception being North America. However, Alco owned a license from Beyer-Peacock to build this type of locomotive and a "Super-Garratt" type using four power trucks was even sketched in the early days of the development of the Big Boy type for the Union Pacific.
So, armed with my modelling license, I decided to build a three foot gauge, 1:20 scale Garratt as Alco would have done. The model uses two Accucraft Ruby chassis powered by a Titch boiler.
The Titch is one of the smalest ride-on scale locomotive: it weights less than 20Kg and yet it is capable of pulling a full size human (on a flat, dry track at least). I bought the boiler in "kit" form in late 2003. The kit consits of copper tubes and assorted flanged parts to build a true, wet firebox, locmotive boiler. My friend Henner and I have been slowly putting it together over the past couple of years.
This past Saturday, we reached a point of no return: the two major sub-assemblies that make up the boiler (barrel plus outer firebox and the inner firebox and tubes) were soldered together. The result was a mixed bag: on one hand the solder joints look good but on the other hand, the inner firebox became unsoldered from the fire ring. Putting this boiler together has been a long string of setbacks... But the end is in sight!
The current batch of pictures in the gallery (accessed by clicking the image above.) show a mock-up of the locomotive I put together before Saturday's important soldring job. Initialy, I brought a box of Lego bricks with me to build little support structures to hold the boiler and power trucks in position. Since I had a lot of bricks I decided to build the cab, main frames and water tanks!
This is a model of a "could have been" locomotive. The Garratt type was developped by the British company Beyer-Peacock. They saw service almost everywhere in the world, a notable exception being North America. However, Alco owned a license from Beyer-Peacock to build this type of locomotive and a "Super-Garratt" type using four power trucks was even sketched in the early days of the development of the Big Boy type for the Union Pacific.
So, armed with my modelling license, I decided to build a three foot gauge, 1:20 scale Garratt as Alco would have done. The model uses two Accucraft Ruby chassis powered by a Titch boiler.
The Titch is one of the smalest ride-on scale locomotive: it weights less than 20Kg and yet it is capable of pulling a full size human (on a flat, dry track at least). I bought the boiler in "kit" form in late 2003. The kit consits of copper tubes and assorted flanged parts to build a true, wet firebox, locmotive boiler. My friend Henner and I have been slowly putting it together over the past couple of years.
This past Saturday, we reached a point of no return: the two major sub-assemblies that make up the boiler (barrel plus outer firebox and the inner firebox and tubes) were soldered together. The result was a mixed bag: on one hand the solder joints look good but on the other hand, the inner firebox became unsoldered from the fire ring. Putting this boiler together has been a long string of setbacks... But the end is in sight!
The current batch of pictures in the gallery (accessed by clicking the image above.) show a mock-up of the locomotive I put together before Saturday's important soldring job. Initialy, I brought a box of Lego bricks with me to build little support structures to hold the boiler and power trucks in position. Since I had a lot of bricks I decided to build the cab, main frames and water tanks!
posted by David Wegmuller at 5:05 PM
