Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Narrow Gauge - Part 2



Our quest to find suitable and, more importantly, commercially available motive power for our to be built narrow gauge system serving the steel making facilities of our mill, has led us to the Grandt Line 25 Tonner.   The GE 25 ton locomotive will make an excellent machine for use in the mill.  My first concern was whether this locomotive could be regauged to run on HOn30 track.  An internet search only brought up one reference as to regauging and it wasn't a how-to thing.  I decided to take a chance and ordered the HOn3 kit for this locomotive.  Upon reading through the instructions - yes - the wheelsets can be regauged for 30" track.   Now comes the hard part - building this sucker.  I've worked with GrandtLine locomotives in O-gauge - when it says kit, you have to build every last little piece down to the individual gears.  The running quality of my O gauge finished locomotives wasn't great so I am hoping this will be better - if not it does look feasible to mount a good n-scale mechanism under the hood.    The photo shows the box and what is in it.  In the next blog I'll start documenting the steps building this unit.  If all goes well and everything runs good, then I'll have to build a half dozen more.

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