Gloria sic point motor

I don't know if I mentioned it but Arnold lane Wharf is going to Bala this weekend coming as part of the Bala Lake Railway gala. Well it is, anyway so I thought some titivation was in order and most importantly I needed to sort out the point motor which supposedly changed the king point to the yard. When I had added point motors and replaced the two sets of points I had never really got this one to throw convincingly in one direction so I set about fixing it. The motor was situated under the board and the actuator rod poked up through a hole. After several hours of buggering about trying to adjust the position of the motor etc etc, I gave up.

 



The obvious plan B was to mount the motor above the board and hide it in the hut which was almost in the right place... so rip up the hut and the surrounding cobbles....

 



Install the new motor on its base, reinstate the hut and the surrounding ground cover etc.

 



Sounds simple and in fact it was pretty much although it took most of a day off.

 

As the exhibition is at Bala where the Hunslet is king I thought it would be good to get my two functional and tarted up. Gloria is my Chivers/Minitrains bash which I hadn't finished - but nearly. With a couple of evenings work on the paint and the detailing here she was, a bit shiny but pretty good looking.

 

The chassis ran beautifully as Minitrains chassis tend to so all it needed was the cylinders painting the same colour as the body. As the body is spray painted I squirted some of the Halfords paint into a lid and brushed it onto the cylinders. Lovely. Only I had managed to get some on one of the slide bars but not notice which locked the mechanism solid. Once the paint was dry I put the loco on the test track: nothing. Prod, prod - curl of smoke from the cab. Much swearing. Knackered motor. More swearing some beer and annoyedness.

 



Pretty but useless

 

Having lain awake beating myself up for being a twat I thought a short term answer would be to use the motor from the chassis waiting for the completion of my NP Hudswell Clarke. After more fiddling about I swapped the motors over and cleaned up the paint from where it didn't ought to be and eventually all was well, she now runs nicely and looks good too. After the show I will weather her and dull her down but for now shiny is fine.

 



Functional at last

 

Also looking better for a tart up is my Brian Madge Britomart. I still think I can get it to run better having seen lots of his other locos running smooth as you like. watch this space.

 

The terrible twins (not identical)

 

Oberon's name plates arrived too. Nice loco.

 

If you are at all curious as to the origins of the name Gloria I would point you towards the movie, Brassed Off. An excellent film and still in my top ten movies.

 

The whole thing