When the dust settled

I left off the blog at the point where I had got the layout running again after the dust had all been cleared away. But summer intervened, and it’s taken us a long time to get back to the train set again. And at first it seemed like we were going to have all sorts of problems – the first three locos I tried to run all had problems of one sort or another – which I put down to poor conductivity on the rails. Then I came across one of my son’s star locos – a Hornby class 08 diesel model (an R156). And it sped around the track like there was no tomorrow! (Not bad for a shunter which according to some sources was only supposed to run at 20 mph in real life!).

Hornby R156 - a Class 08 Diesel

Now one difference was that the diesel had been kept out of sight in a storage drawer. It is also one of the more modern models, and one of the more recent additions to our collection. So the problem seemed to be more with the locos than the rails. I thought I would test the power running through the rails at different points using a small cheap multimeter I had picked up from Maplin for about a tenner. It’s a mysterious gadget if your knowledge about electrics is as rusty as mine is! But I managed to get consistent readings of 13v pretty much anywhere I tested (using a straight 12 V input from a small transformed rather than the Hornby power control equipment). It was much later that I worked out that I should have been testing current in amps, not the voltage! In any event it persuaded me to look harder at the loco’s rather than the rails.

So I picked up the Eddie Stobart loco intending to add a little more oil to see if that would improve things. But before I could do that I noticed the state of the wheels – filthy! And sure enough the wheels on the other locos’s were all in a pretty poor state too. So there we were on Saturday afternoon. Mum was out at the shops, Al had finished his homework and E had been to ballet and gotten back again. “What are your doing, Dad?” they asked, and soon enough, all three of us were sitting around the breakfast table, fully engaged in our Railway Maintenance Working Party. Each of us worked on the wheels of a different loco, just rubbing them gently with a paper tissue; a pile of blackened tissues as testament to our work. Mum came back, so we only had a quick chance to do some test running – and what an improvement.