Dublo Three Rail Layout

[Wolseley]

I'll post some photos later.

Here are my two Castles. On the left, the earlier three rail Bristol Castle (an original and, apart from a paint chip on the tender, mint example) with the half inch motor, and the later Ringfield version (a three railed conversion of a Dublo two rail Cardiff Castle renamed and renumbered as Isambard Kingdom Brunel). The Ringfield motor takes up virtually all the space in the cab and then sticks out a bit into the bargain. Not a very good look, although if you use your imagination it does vaguely look like a boiler backhead......

And, to show what the Ringfield looks like underneath the body, here are my two West Country locomotives, Dorchester (the three rail version) on the left, and Barnstaple (the two rail version, but here converted to three rail) on the right. I used these locomotives to illustrate the appearance of the motor, as I've had my Ringfield Castle apart several times over the last few weeks due to a number of issues with its performance and, as it's now running perfectly, I wanted to leave it alone.

[Wolseley]

Just to show you that I haven't abandoned everything, here's what I'm working on at the moment. I just have a bit of detailing to do on the loco, but the coaches are very much a work in progress. It started off as a Dublo 0-6-2T but the rear got stretched a bit, a trailing bogie from a 2-6-4T was fitted, and a few changes were made to the boiler fittings.

Behold the Hornby Dublo Highland Railway 0-6-4T:

[Bigmet]

...Behold the Hornby Dublo Highland Railway 0-6-4T.

The ribs over the cab roof and coal rails around the bunker to add? Good conversion of this old model which never looked much like the N2 thanks to the un-GNR cab roof profile!

[Wolseley]

The ribs over the cab roof and coal rails around the bunker to add?

I might put coal rails on it but, then again, maybe not. I am undecided on that, although I will be adding a coal load to the bunker.

I was originally going to add ribbing to the cab roof but decided against it due to the difficulty of fixing styrene or maybe brass, to a mazak casting. I had visions of the details becoming detached with handling. In any case, this was not going to be a 100% accurate scale model anyway. I have an unfinished Sutherland Castings white-metal kit that will eventually fulfil that role.

this old model which never looked much like the N2 thanks to the un-GNR cab roof profile!

To be fair to Meccano Ltd, though, as far as I know they never called it an N2 (although they gave it the number of one), preferring instead to just call it an 0-6-2 tank.

[Wolseley]

The latest additions to the locomotive stud are not Dublo at all, nor are they British outline. They are a pair of Lima Australian outline NSWGR C38 class Pacifics. For their day (1970ish?) they weren't bad models, although they were let down by the tender, which wasn't a C38 tender at all, but was sourced from Lima's earlier SNCF 141R.

They have pickup from one rail via the locomotive, and the other rail via the tender, with the electrical connection through the tender drawbar. To enable them to run on 3 rail track, I fitted a Marklin skate to the locomotive, and replaced the tender bogies with ones from a couple of playworn Dublo bogie well wagons, to give electrical pickup on all eight tender wheels with no need to rewire anything other than connecting the skate to the motor (the wires had to be reversed to make the locomotive go in the right direction as with most two to three rail conversions). One of them can manage four Dublo coaches before it starts slipping, but the other one can only manage three for some reason. As my layout is 8' by 4', this isn't really a problem.

The model was produced in both lined green and plain black variants. Here is the green one:

[Wolseley]

My current project is finishing a pair of GEM Cardeans, using three railed Tri-ang B12 chassis. As I have no need for two identical locomotives, I am finishing one in Caledonian blue and the other in early LMS red. I can see that the most time consuming exercise here is going to be the lining......

[GeraldH]

I love seeing 3 rail with the scenery and the various conversions are excellent. Nice to see a 3 rail C38 too .

[Wolseley]

A couple of recent photos:

[Wolseley]

Here is one of my latest projects, slowly approaching completion. I had an old DJH Caledonian Railway 60 class kit - a very early one with a chassis that consisted of two rectangles of brass, with the holes drilled in slightly different places in each one, which didn't help in assembly. I gave up on making a working chassis from the parts provided and took a Tri-ang Albert Hall, which ran well but had very poor bodywork

First I converted the chassis to three rail, using a Marklin skate, then I removed all the locomotive's superstructure, leaving just the footplate and, after slightly shortening it at both ends, assembled the DJH 60 class bits on it. The tender is the DJH one but with an underframe from Caley Coaches, as the axle holes on the DJH kit did not line up.

Here is where I'm up to. Photographs are very unkind in that they show up flaws in the finish that the naked eye doesn't see......

[Bigmet]

That's coming on very well. Real working steam locos, once they had put in a few months in service after construction or a major overhaul, had all sorts of 'flaws' in their external appearance, dents and creases in the claddings and other external sheet metalwork, bent handrails, coal rails, oil piping and the like, cladding band ends not properly anchored, and on some classes characteristic structure deformations: many eight coupleds exhibited a bend in the front frames resulting from the daily battering in heavy freight work.


As for the parts provided for mechanism construction in the late 1960s onwards whitemetal kits that I constructed; these relied on the assembler knowing that all dimensions had to be checked and the parts 'fettled' to make a sound working job. I had the good fortune that the father of a schoolfriend had commenced his ME career as a premium apprentice under Bulleid at Inchicore, and could explain the process by which real locomotives were erected in this manner. In this respect the old kits did somewhat reflect the reality of steam traction construction, frustrating though overcoming the resulting problems might have been...

[Wolseley]

Thanks for your comments. It's probably time to post a bit more......

As an experiment, I converted a Tri-ang Hall chassis to three rail using a Dublo pickup rather than a Marklin skate (there's just barely enough room underneath for the Dublo pickup to fit, but fit it does). The chassis is destined to become the basis of a Caledonian 944 class 4-6-2T, but that is some time off in the future.

What I did find was that the newly converted chassis ran better than my earlier conversions using Marklin skates, which seem to have a few issues from time to time with negotiating diamond crossings, so I have taken my three Caledonian 4-6-0s out of service and will change the pickups on them. In case you're wondering, the three comprise one 60 class, which is an amalgam of Tri-ang Hall and DJH kit bits, and two Cardeans (one in Caledonian blue and one in LMS Crimson Lake) being GEM kits on Tri-ang B12 chassis.

In recent developments, I have got my hands on a Hornby Dublo EMU power car to match the trailer car I picked up for a bargain price about six months ago. It was a two rail version, as the three rail ones are, in comparison, rather rare, and attract the sort of prices I don't want to pay. I had to fabricate a new insulator for the pickup assembly but, other than that, it was pretty straightforward. Here it is:

Next is a Dublo 2-6-4T painted in LMS black (and needing a coat of flat clear to get rid of the gloss). The coaches are more of my hybrids - Graham Farish LMS suburbans fitted to Dublo SD suburban underframes. I had two Farish coaches which didn't run properly and two badly rusted Dublo SD suburbans, so I married the Farish bodies to the Dublo underframes. Not a perfect fit, as the bodies are about 1.5mm too narrow for the underframes but, at normal viewing distances, you would never notice.

Last is the City of Bradford (a three railed Dublo City of London) finished in BR lined black (as was the real one prior to being painted in BR blue). It is coupled to a tender that comprises a Dublo A4 tender chassis with a slightly shortened (to make it fit the Dublo chassis) tender body from a Bachmann Austerity. The City of Bradford actually ran like this on the Southern Region during the 1948 Locomotive Exchanges, due to there not being any water troughs on the Southern. It's not obvious from the photo, but it's coupled up to a rake of green Dublo SD corridor coaches.

[Lysander]

Love that EMU.

Tony

[Wolseley]

Another area where I have deviated a bit from what you would expect from a classic Dublo layout, is the introduction of lighting. Now there were lighting kits available for some of the plastic buildings introduced in the 1960s, but only the engine shed and goods shed on my layout come into that category (there were no earlier equivalents for these in the post-war era). The station buildings, platforms and signal box on my layout are the earlier metal structures, for which lighting was not an option, unless you rigged up something yourself, as I have done:

[manna]

G'Day Gents

Been many a year since I've seen a Holden FE/FC taxi, like it.

manna

[Mountain]

Very nice!