Peckforton Light Railway: Progress Report 89

Sunday, April 04, 2021

Progress Report 89

It's been a fairly busy month, but by comparison with other months, not very productive. However, there are a few things to report.

Schull & Skibbereen loco

I was very pleased with the TinkerCAD drawing and 3D printing of the body for the Wilson & Nasmyth loco - even though it required a fair amount of tweaking and redesigning to ensure all the various elements worked together.

The printed pieces went together well, though I had to make a few adjustments to fit the outside frames behind the cylinders.

However, I was seriously disappointed with the Bachmann Lyn donor mechanism. The motor block simply lacked power. It struggled to climb my 1:40 gradients with even a modest load and visibly slowed on curves. I suspected it had something to do with the oversized worm gears but, as the original motor had been replaced with a larger Buhler alternative, and some modifications had been made to the casing to fit it in, I wasn't sure if that was the cause of the problem. I redesigned the motor block housing to provide a better fit for the motor, but this made little difference.

When I used a new motor block, kindly donated by a fellow modeller, and found performance was almost identical, I concluded that the original design of the motor block was the culprit.

I am currently exploring ways of rebuilding the motor block with smaller worm gears, but am struggling to find a worm which meshes with the original Bachmann worm wheels. My next recourse is to try to find a way of replacing the worm wheels, but this will be difficult as they are moulded to force fit into the stub axles on the wheels.

I did try contacting Bachmann to see if I could get a couple of the smaller worms which they now use in the most recent version of the Lyn gearbox, but was told I would have had to buy a complete new motor block which, at £120 including postage from the USA, is more than I paid for the loco.

Arduino control revisited

After making some videos of the history of the railway (see below), I realised I haven't reviewed and revised the Arduino based radio control system which I devised a year or so ago (see How I created a radio control system using Arduino components - pending). Despite several tweaks and rebuilds, I was unable to get the system to work with 100% reliability and so put it on the back burner.

I am now exploring ways in which I can use Bluetooth modules in both the receiver and the transmitter. When using a Bluetooth receiver with my mobile phone, the system seemed to be a lot more stable than trying to use an NRF24 module. I am hoping that pairing two Bluetooth modules will prove to be equally reliable.

3D printed accessories

Although I printed them out a couple of months ago, I didn't get around to finishing them off and so I spent some time completing the assembly of the level crossing gates and tidied up the rest of the station nameboards which I had drawn in TinkerCAD and printed out.

These will be deployed around the railway on my next running session

Loco roster

After compiling a spreadsheet catalogue of the content of all my YouTube videos, I realised it was some time since I had presented a complete list of the locomotives on the railway (see Loco Roster - May 2015 and video roster 2015)

A Brief History of the Railway

I also took the opportunity to browse back through videos and photos to compile a brief history of the Peckforton Light Railway, from its inception in 2004 to the end of 2020. I found the experience to be quite enlightening. I hadn't realised just how much work has already gone into the railway - and just how much I did while I was still working full-time. I just wonder, now I'm retired, where the time goes!