Ok, quick up date. The kids came in for a week for New Years (delayed Christmas) and I got to play trains with my grandson every day. And to my surprise, my 2 year granddaughter loved the trains too! I got the new track and cross over down and ran some 14 gauge wire under the table and dropped some feeder lines through out. Got the rails cleaned up and cleaned the wheels on the engines. The combination of the new feeds and the clean wheels made a big difference and now there is no longer any flickering or loss of power.
Last weekend I found some LNER Teak coaches on Ebay in England and bought a few for the Flying Scotsman. Oddly enough, both sellers live within an hour from my daughter and her family.
Today, I fixed an area where occasionally some cars from the B&M and the Flying Scotsman would derail. I used the HO Clearance Gauge and found the problem then put a small finishing nail next to the outer rail and tapped it over gently until the rails aligned properly. Don't know if that's a good way to do it or not but I didn't what to pull the track up again. It problem area was where I joined 2 tracks in a curve. Note to self, don't put joints in curves in the future.
Last week I tried using some Great Stuff expandable foam to make a faux coal load for my coal cars. Didn't turn out that great. After I cut the top part of the foam, the foam curled up at both ends instead of just remaining flat. I played with a few of them and kind of got them to fit but I think I'll have to try cutting some loads out of regular pink insulation foam board. The expandable foam ones that I did get to fit, I painted them the other day and today I covered the top with glue and sprinkled some black diamond blasting sand over it. I'll take some pics when they dry.
This morning I spent some time working on the hoppers trying to replace the horn couplers with Kadee couplers. Got 2 done but the rest have talgo trucks and variants. I'll have to do some research and see what I need to do. I also worked on 3 freight cars and a closed hopper to see if I could get them to work properly but their wheels get falling off and shorting the track. All of them have metal sprung trucks. I'm thinking I'm going to have to replace all of them with new plastic trucks.
Here is a truck on my small hopper that looks like the horn coupler has been pined in place. I don't see a way of removing the cover to replace the coupler.
Ok time to do some research.