Stephen Johnson Models 400 Class Railmotor

This last week I have been enjoying some time with the family down the Gold Coast with a beautiful view of the beach at Coolangatta and Greenmount.  The weather was very good, except for Thursday when the wind got up.  With Test cricket on the TV for many of the days and daily trips to the beach and the pool, I did not have much time to do much modelling.  We even had some visitors on a few days.  However, I did take some kits down to the unit to work on.  I decided to get my Stephen Johnson Models 400 Class railmotor out and have a good look at it.  It did not require much clean up.  This seems like a very good quality kit.  The four sides were glued together and the roof trial fitted.  The roof is made up of two end pieces and the main roof section.  These too were also glued together.  I will have to work out how I will secure the roof onto the model - maybe a screw up through the floor into the roof section.  So after this initial construction, I then put the thinking cap on as to how to power the railmotor.  I thought I might have had some sort of 4 wheel power bogie somewhere at home.

It was not until I came back from the coast that I searched the shed today and found out that one of the power bogies from an old loco was tried.  The locomotive, one of three provided to me by my father-in-law many years ago.  I could never sell them, so they have sat on the same siding in Grafton Yard for close to 10 years.  So one loco was disassembled, and the motor was tried out with a power supply.  It actually worked.  However, the power mechanism, had plastic wheels with traction tyres.  No that was never going to work.  So I pulled the bogie apart and remove the axel and took off the plastic wheels.  I then had to search the shed for suitable replacements.  Well I found some old Powerline 81 class drive wheels (I think) and the wheel were the same diameter as the Tyco ones.  You never know you luck in the big city, and the drive gear on the axel meshed with the trial train on the Tyco power bogie.  I applied power and everything turns.  So that is a big start.  

So this arvo, I built a styrene chassis out of some 0.080" styrene with some stiffeners to fit inside the 400 Class railmotor and the power bogie fits in and seems to have enough turn to seem confident that when I finally wire it up, it should be a viable mechanism for the railmotor.  The brass etch for the cow catchers were glued on and the model is starting to look pretty good. I also drilled a hole in the chassis for the power pickup bogie.  This was trial fitted this afternoon and maybe later tonight, or one night this week, I will solder the relevant wires to a spare NCE decoder I have sitting around in the shed and see if it works. 

It will then get a test run around the layout.  Next weekend I will look at how I can get this unit painted, then decaled.  I will then try and fit some headlights and maybe internal cab lighting.  It might just be my own Christmas present to myself.