A very old locomotive

[musket the dog]

Recently in my head I've been having a rethink of my railway's fictional history, owing to a house move and the chance to start all over again. In my head now the Narborough and Littlethorpe Light Railway first came into existence in 1845 with the introduction of two locomotives to haul aggregate on an ex-horse drawn tramway. Both built by Foster, Rastrick and Company.

In reality this idea has always floated around my head but following a trip to the national railway museum a couple of weeks ago I now have a prototype which I am going to base one of these locomotives on. the locomotive is the 1829 0-4-0 Agenoria, which I know by 1829 was already an outdated design and would have been very unlikely to hang around until 1845, but rule 8 prevails here.

With this model I am not really going for any sort of accuracy or strict scaling, I merely want to capture the look of the original and the complex motion of the pair of beams that drove the wheels.

This is the locomotive in question, also I believe to the same design as the Stourbridge Lion, the first locomotive to operate in the USA.

 

[musket the dog]

So far I have drawn up my plans for the motion and build up running chassis for the engine and the tender. The loco itself is build on a pair of modified LGB spoked wheels and will be powered by a single AA battery which will be hidden in the tender, which also houses the on/off/direction switch.

Compared to most of my G scale stuff it is quite small, but I hope a nice chunky boiler will help bulk up its dimensions a bit and it shouldn't look too out of place in front of the small rake of tubs I plan to build from those Really Useful Boxes (details on someone else's thread on the forum I believe)

 

[musket the dog]

That's as far as I have gotten in the last week as this has been what I have been doing on my breaks from revision. I have hit a snag with the boiler though. Not sure what I could use for it as the design incorporates a domed shape at the front end and a rounded flat at the firebox, I did think maybe a fizzy drinks can could be modified for this but I would have to consider its strength first

 

[mike]

go for it!

 

[yb281]

Nice build Ricky.

 

[Miamigo259]

This is the locomotive in question, also I believe to the same design as the Stourbridge Lion, the first locomotive to operate in the USA.

An absolute b....... to get a photo of in the Town museum at Honesdale, PA, last September (the exhibition room isn't very big!) , this is the replica of the "Stourbridge Lion" built by the Delaware & Hudson in 1932.

 

[mbiff]

me likin it buddy

 

[persistent_bodger]

I really like this project, I've always liked early locomotives designs. Where is the motor and gear from?

Boiler wise I use varying sizes of plumbing waste pipe, you can get bits and pieces from most hard ware stores.

Look forward to watching progress

Tim

 

[mike]

live steam
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/live-stea...lway_Models&hash=item1c2680e6f6#ht_500wt_1287

 

[Dtsteam]

These little gearboxes are great for playing around with simple battery loco's. As Ricky notes, they will potter round on one cell, although the motor is good for 6 volts. They need a cable tie round the motor barrel and gearbox housing otherwise they jump out of gear. Whats really good, though, is that the axle is the same diameter as an LGB wagon axle, so its dead easy to fit the plastic wheels.

This is where I got mine from.
http://www.mindsetsonline.co.uk/index.php?cPath=16_13_433&osCsid=lbe8rgou63c4uujo0kn86heo16

 

[musket the dog]

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement, I am really enjoying this build Lots of problems to solve though

Cheers for the pictures Miagimo, I had not seen any decent pictures of the lion yet, it seems odd how spindly its frames are compared to the English version. Also there area a hell of a lot of rivets on that!

Hi Tim, the link David posted shows the exact same gearbox as the one that I am using. I 'borrowed' mine from an old school project but I think they can also be found at Maplins. I think I get what you mean, a lot of variation of basic principals in early designs and I find they often work in interesting ways aswell. And modelling it in G scale means it's large enough that even I can figure it out

:admire: Cor, that ain't half nice Mike. I could sell my car for it and then buy some track too :thinking:

 

[musket the dog]

Seeing as how miserable today is I've made some progress on No. 1's tender. Started to build the water tank and added frames for a shutter at the front. This will be so that I can add a removable load to sit on top and hide the battery

 

[musket the dog]

Bit more progress this week. I have nearly completed the tender, just waiting to paint the tank, but I may buy some fake rivets for it first. connecting rods are cut for the locomotive and I have uploaded a small video to Youtube showing a small test run along the floor of my engineering classroom.

Been on the hunt for drain pipe and have found nothing, I will have to ask my Dad's plumber if he has any off-cuts of a suitable size next time he's in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU1Hcqi0RWk

 

[jublybug]

Likeing this little project keep us posted

Jim

 

[musket the dog]

Got a break between my exams and have made a bit more progress on No.1. Got myself a boiler and have started a dome and put a funnel on. As it turns our I am quite happy with how the dimensions have turned out, in my eyes with the short chunky boiler it looks just right. Also had a go at some punch riveting on the funnel bracket and I am quite pleased with how it has turned out.

Next step is to cut the second boiler seat and a footplate and make a start on the cylinders and motion.

Final pictures are just a couple from the notebook that I work from

 

[Steve]

This looks brilliant Ricky look forward to seeing more

 

[musket the dog]

Hi Ross,

Thanks for the heads up, did you mean this place?
http://www.ema-models.co.uk/index.php/

Lots of useful pieces there, well worth a look if you're scratch-building. Unfortunately nothing the right size to solve my boiler end problems but the piping and angles look very interesting.

 

[tramcar trev]

Very very nice...
To this day what amazes me about these early locomotives is the techniques of manufacture, they had at best primitive tools but a very thorough understanding of how to cast iron so that wheels remained more or less circular straight out of the sand. Welding as we know it was non existant and the wheels were held to the axles by an ingenoius amalgam of urine and cast iron filings. I have somewhere a copy of William Hedley's workshop notes on building the original "Puffing Billy" in 1813. Intersting reading for those moddeling in this era as the detail sketches of various components shows just how clever these guys were, they were working using their own brains and at the very razors edge of the technology of the era in fact some were actually in front of the razors edge, Stephenson springs to mind using a series of horizontal tubes in his boilers.... Remember too that Whitworth did not have his threads till 1841 sorted, no steel as we know it today; it was amazing that these boilers did not all burst. Consider too that medical experts of the day were really really distraught because 30MPH was the fastest a human body could travel, faster than that and it just exploded....

Your doing a really good job with this....

 

[musket the dog]

Thank you for the kind words Trev, as an aspiring engineer I find it all fascinating. I remember reading a quote somewhere from a gentleman inspecting one of the Stephenson's first engines (Possibly Rocket at Rainhill) that 'the tolerances involved were so fine that one was barely able to pass a farthing between the piston and the cylinder wall' or something along those lines. Lots of different ideas from lots of different people all who had no or very little experience in what they were trying to conceptualise. The results were interesting to say the least

Anyway made some more progress on the loco. The major changes are the almost complete rivet/strapping on the boiler and water tank on the tender and I've also made a footplate for the locomotive. And I've also found myself a solution to my domed boiler problem, I've cut myself a 6mm piece of MDF that I am going to file and sand to shape, hopefully the end result will look half decent.

 

[musket the dog]

Would have made more progress but I have been sidetracked by a second project, building an IP engineering 4 compartment coach. Very impressed with how quickly and easily it has gone together. Just waiting on a shipment of people to fill the insides before I get the roof and lighting fitted. Also need to be painteds, N&L.L.R standard midnight blue and cream of course.

My favourite bit is the posters and line maps, but I'm easily pleased