Motorized Annie & Clarabel Wheel Swap

The coaches in the July 2020 Motorized Thomas, Annie & Clarabel (GHK82) are arguably the best looking of any Revolution/Motorized rolling stock to date. I'm thinking they have great potential as narrow-gauge coaches, being shorter than any previous coaches in any range, while still nicely detailed (rather than merely vans with stickers on).

 

It's curious that they made the faces almost the same, but not exactly the same. Only their mother could really tell them apart.

Before they're allowed on any real railway however, something will clearly have to be done about replacing those 'wheels' with actual wheels. You can't just make a straight replacement because the difference in axle diameter (5.5mm vs. 3mm) makes the fit way too sloppy, and because the difference in wheel diameter (21mm vs. 22mm) means there is insufficient clearance.

 

I tried three different methods, I'm sure there are others and I'd like to hear any ideas. The wheels and axles are from an open wagon (Troublesome Truck), these are good because there's no collars on the ends of the axles to stop you sliding the wheels off.

The first method used a length of styrene tubing. If I'd had 5.5mm OD / 3mm ID tubing to hand this might have been a really good solution, but the material I used was a bit smaller OD and a bit bigger ID, so the result was still a bit too loose for my liking.

The second method used the plastic axle from the original 'wheels' drilled out to accept the 3mm metal axle, and with the 'wheels' cut off. This works pretty well.

 

Both these methods require that the wheel-wells be enlarged slightly to give enough clearance for the larger diameter wheels.

The third method is more work but I think it produces the best result. I removed the axle hangers from a Tomy chassis and glued them onto the Motorized chassis.

 
 

Because the added parts are positioned to give slightly more clearance between the wheels and the chassis, the wheel-wells don't need to be enlarged. The overall result is maybe 0.5mm higher loading gauge, but the difference is insignificant. You might prefer to make these parts from styrene sheet to save cannibalizing a good chassis.

 

Note that the replacement wheels are positioned with the small raised boss on the outside, the larger and flatter disc on the inside, as shown in the two pictures above, this gives the best lateral alignment with the slots in the black chassis-plate.