Happy New Year everyone! Here are a few bashes that I've done for our Garden Railway with little or no investment.
Here are two service trucks that I made just to see if I could. I build aluminum G scale train bridges and figured I needed a service crew to maintain them and this is what I built.
[View:http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/themes/trc/utility/:550:0]
The Ford Supervisor Truck is simply a 1/24 scale truck with a section of the undercarriage removed just enough to fit a motor block from a G scale Speeder. I have grades on my layout up to 6% and these little guys will run all day long. The Service Bucket Truck required a slight 1/4" frame extension to fit the USA Trains motor block inside the truck frame. Neither of the vehicles interiors had to be damaged to make this happen and I even left the battery powered lighting in tact. The hardest lesson I learned was wheel clearance. Very important actually! I got the wheels as close to the rail as possible so that it would ocassionally graze the rail giving the illusion that the wheels actually propel the trucks.
Since I built an oil derek from old HO scale flex track I figured I needed something a little more pratical to get the crude out of the ground. My solution, gather up all the brass sheet & tube strip scraps and build a pumping jack. I also wanted it animated. When I was the manager of a local jiffy lube I was told to throw away an old animated sign where the background moved to show how stuff worked. I took it home and tore it apart and got some nice parts including a very slow RPM motor. I built my jack, added a motor and with some trial & error I finally had a working model. I immediately put it outside on the layout at the beginning of winter. I figured I didn't have a dime in it so if it didn't work ... Oh well. That was three years ago! The original motor finally died this summer and I replaced it with a slower one I got from from eBay.
Running out of time this morning so here are a few links to my photo pages and websites showing our layout & accessories. I'll add more here as I get the chance. Questions, comments and expansions to these ideas are always welcome and thanks for reading. See ya next year!
http://our-garden-railroad.homestead.com/index.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shaneclara/
http://www.wix.com/shaneclara/g-scale
http://www.bridgemangscale.com/
Looks Good! - Peter
Modeling the Bellefonte Central Railroad
Fan of the PRR
Garden Railway Enthusiast
Check out my Youtube Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/PennsyModeler
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