DalaGStanator's Customs, Mods and Experiments

The passenger cars' side walls were cut down once they were found to be too high when folded up. They now match the height of the engine's cab minus the roof and even their chassis line up with the footplate. More importantly, they scale better with the figures and I've prepared doors for them (not pictured) by tracing a special piece with an oval hole in it (resembling a window). I won't add them until I could find what's wrong with the bogies even after I realigned them. One disadvantage to the way I decided to join the side frames: having a single dowel join them right in the centre doesn't leave much room for a bushing to keep the bogies from falling out. I glued such bushings to the shafts and put them in before regluing the top plates to the frames. They're still not perfectly centred due to the bases being wider at one side, and I don't want to downgrade to four wheels like on the Union stock.



To fit the couplers, I added simple holders at each end similar to BumBin's rolling stock and made sure the couplers were level with each other, swivelled loosely and allowed both cars to form an L shape without decoupling themselves; not that any of my track systems would be 'that' tight, but still. Also raised the loco's tender coupler and added supports for the rear since it wasn't level with the front. It could be the coupler is still too low and that's why the cars keep tipping over; sometimes, one bogie on each will fall onto the sleepers and "leap" while the other will stay on fine. While the tender has enough torque to pull both while also pushing the loco, the train runs laughably badly due to the aforementioned problems. Even if I'll raise the tender coupler again, they still tip over without the loco. If all else fails, the walls could be repurposed for a (larger than TOMY) signal box, station or other similar building.