Author: Frédéric

Garden Railway: Breaking Ground

The railway’s premisese are staked out

Since I found my way back to model railways, I had the wish to build my own garden railway. When we moved back in 2015, a garden became available and this spring my father left me over some tracks. But it wasn’t until this autumn, that I could find enough time and money to actually start with construction.

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Porter: Detailing and Knuckle Couplers

Since the first test run some time has passed by, but there have been only a few opportunities to make progress with the tender’s construction. Nevertheless I managed to slip into the shop now and then and today I’d like to summarize the progress.

Tender mit Klauenkupplung und Rangiertritt
Tender with knuckle coupler and conductor’s platform

The most important thing first: the tender’s got a knuckle coupler. On the one hand it seemed plausible to me, since I’m going to model a railroad at the beginning of the 20th century, as mentioned on creating the blueprints. On the other hand I’m hoping for easier operations. I’ve already got some experience with link and pin couplers and I find it quite cumbersome to pull and put the links and pins between the cars with a long set of tweezers. Knuckle couplers however allow for automatic coupling at the best of times, especially if you can set brakes on the cars. Decoupling is even easier if you have cut levers at the side of the cars or use an R/C-controlled servo to pull the pin.

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A Timewarp and Construction Diaries

A lot has been going on in the last months, hence I haven’t found much time to post on this site.

I posted the last updates on building the Porter tender in single posts, with their date matching the days when I actually worked on the model. Since some of them date back several months, here’s a list of new posts:

Besides that I created an index page listing all posts concerning my construction diaries. I hope this will make it easier to find specific steps in the construction process. The index page is now listed as a submenu item of “Model Railway”.