1/24 scale South African Railway "Cape Gauge 1"

[Riekus]

Thanx for all the replies, lads. I think i have a plan with the bogies. Drew some preliminary plans in Coral. Will cut them over the weekend and check if it works.

I am progressing slowly. Built the cab today and as these things go.....saw that my windows are too small. Which is maybe a good thing....as i completely botched the roof on the one side.

Dont know how that happened.

Anyway....some of you mentioned how big it is. And by no means a small loco, she still is almost 9cm shorter than the class 34. Will post some pics to demonstrate.

So far so good. The last body bit needs to house the decoder , smoker with the speaker directly in front of that. Got a brilliant soundfile for it. I must just write the smoke map.

I reckon another month or two and she will purr. Some things will now be outsourced. Then you can do nothing but wait.

Oh....cabplates are being etched by Carel as we speak....

Laters!!!

 

[Riekus]

Oh and that front bulkhead....just to measure how high from the rail i want to put it. So i cut it out of a piece of 6mm i had lying around. Scale one would be 2mm down and 4mm at the running board.

 

[Tropic Blunder1]

Ive been following your progress on facebook and just saw your post here. Great to see 1:24 scale modelling coming back into vogue. its been quite a popular scale here in Australia for modelling our Narrow gauge prototypes but there arent that many posts about it on the web. keep up the excellent work!

 

[Riekus]

Well well well, quite a steep learning curve here for me. Jan Gouws from SARM coined a phrase he called "ness". If he was building a 34 at the time, when he got it right, he felt "34ness". I learned that now with my first model. Especially on here with my cellphone pics enlarged, I just could not feel 32ness.

Something was amiss. When building a train, one has constants. Stuff that cannot be changed. Like on this train the bogies were 6mm a side too long. Not much at all. But I overcompensated.

The thing about the class 32 that originally took me when i first saw it back in 1989, was indeed the array of wheels with the ponies at each end and the fact that it was a compact machine. Stocky almost. What I was building did not look like that. It was way too long.

So back to the drawing board. I measured and re-measured. And cut and swore and drew new plans. Along the way I found out that the body was actually completely different to the later GE offering we had. The walls were higher and the radius of the bend into the roof different. I was a whole 3.5cm too long as well. All the problems in the long hood.

I actually cut and built 4 bodies prior to this last one before I felt 32ness. Hehehehe, but it measures out now 100% to scale. I even got the diesel tank in at scale dimensions. I am busy detailing a chassis rail and I have started with the airtanks.

One thing is brutally clear though. It is a very very pretty loco to my eye. Will post pictures just now. Let me know what you think.

 

[Riekus]

Here we go