Piko Red River engine shed with automatic doors

[whatlep]

This is a brief review of the small Piko Red River engine shed (catalogue number 62044). It's posted since the kit has a couple of features which I haven't encountered before and may be of interest to others.

The kit itself is a perfectly standard Piko kit, comprising standard parts used in several kits. These are glued together with plastic tags (joiners) to form a wall section as shown below:

I'm not a huge fan of this aspect of Piko kits since the structure is never as strong as a single wall section as used in, amongst others, Pola's kits. On the other hand, Piko's system keeps component costs down. With the small stone base used on this model it shouldn't be too much of a problem. Once assembled and other components added, a typical wall section looks like this:

Now the last picture shows the first interesting aspect of this kit's design. Those black items at each corner are designed to act as "keystones" for the entire structure, removing the need to glue the main walls of the building. This will become clearer in a moment.

My habit is to build up all the sub-assemblies of a building and then leave the glue to set hard for at least 12 hours. Here's the building's bits lined up last night:

This morning, I began to assemble the building. On this kit, that introduces the second unusual feature, a semi-automatic door opening and closing mechanism. This consists of a brass rod running the length of the building, over which slides a length of brass tube which is secured at one end in a piece of plastic. A shaped piece of springy stainless steel wire links the piece of plastic to the two main doors to the loco shed. More on the system's operation in a moment.

This is traditionally the point at which things become tricky. Glueing walls together without 90 degree clamps is fraught with opportunities for your family to learn new words of Anglo-Saxon origin and the cat to learn to fly. Or indeed to glue the dining room table to your new model. Not so with this beastie. Those black lugs now come into their own. Very simply, but brilliantly, they interlock at each corner and are secured with a plastic pin. No glue, no mess, no hassle!

To my surprise, the whole shebang is sufficiently precisely engineered to be absolutely firm even for just two walls. Try glueing two walls and immediately taking a picture similar to this....

 

[whatlep]

All four walls are connected using the lugs and pins and in under 5 minutes you have a rock solid simple structure. Cool! At this point, it was clearly time to test the automatic door mechanism and verify what locos could go in the shed. As can be seen, a Stainz will fit, but with only millimetres to spare.

Fortunately my intended loco for this shed is a Liliput (Bachmann) Davenport which is a rather more comfortable fit.

The overhead views give some idea of how the door opening mechanism works. Going into the shed, an incoming loco meets the piece of plastic which pulls the doors shut after it. Exiting the shed the loco pushes against the doors which spring open. If that isn't clear, here's a video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sZNB05THb8&feature=youtu.be < Link To http://www.youtube.com/wa...8&feature=youtu.be
The system seems to work pretty well, though whether it will stand up to the rigours of outdoor use in the English climate remains to be seen. There is nothing to stop the door opening feature being removed at a later date if it ceases to operate correctly.

The kit can now be completed. First add the rear annex section which cunningly doubles as a space to accommodate loco couplings. Nice one, Herr Piko! The roof is a simple two piece affair representing corrugated iron with a vent on each section. This needs checking carefully to ensure the extremities stay in alignment while the glue cures. Those black lugs and pins would have been very handy additions here. I've not glued the roof to the walls on my shed, so that it's free to be removed to add lights or rescue the loco. In extremis having a removable roof will also allow the whole kit to be dismantled by removing the pins which hold those black lugs together.

Finally, three assemblies provide steps to the building. These are again simple, yet effective. The stone pattern should really be visible on both sides of the side pieces, but if I hadn't mentioned it, would you really have noticed? The glue tubes are there to show just how little glue has been used in assembling the structure. Piko provide two tubes with the kit (always a nice touch to find glue in the box) yet there is still some left in the first one, despite a tendency to overglue kits.

So there we are. A basic, but to my mind pleasing structure which has wide application on industrial scenes. Easier than usual to assemble thanks to those lugs and pins and with an operating feature which pleased SWMBO and SWMBette. Here's the finished structure with more door testing being undertaken at the request (i.e. insistence) of the female members of the household.

The shed will appear on Ruritanian Railways in due course. For those interested in these details, I purchased mine from http://www.arstechnica.net < Link To www.arstecnica.net via the unusual channel of Amazon UK. Total cost including courier delivery £58.96, compared with over £90 from the cheapest UK retailer I could find.

 

[playmofire]

An excellent review of a very nice looking product. Many thanks.

 

[Madman]

When I first saw your photos of the mechanism, I thought that it couldn't work. My reasoning is that the piece of plastic that gets pushed by the loco only has one track or rod to ride on. It seems to me that pushing too far down on that plastic would bind it on the track its riding on. But it seems to work prfectly.

 

[stevedenver]

well something must have changed, and for the better
fwiw, my older plain grey version doesn't have the rear add on shed-


on the older original version , in plain grey,
my stainz will not clear the shed doors-not its stack nor roof whistle
the only locos i can get in are the LGB FRR locos, the rail truck, the old style KOF (not the ones with roof flashers tho) and the starter set FO type industrial diesel, and spremberger

the LGB us porters wont fit either

and as madman noted i too get the door closing mechansim occasionally hanging up
typcially a loco , even a heavy industrial diesel from the starter set with added weight, will slip agains the push bar-getting out with door closed, howver, is not a problem
it looks like piko has improved the model from the original offereing! my door have a cut out for the rail clearnace-yours appear to have changed to a straight across flat bottom edge as well

i notice that yours has a small, add on, brick section (footers) all the way around the building, mine does not and im certain this makes the difference s to why/how your stainz fits-and mine, alas, does not

so i think ill be adding some footers around mine too

 

[whatlep]

Thanks for the kind words folks.

To answer a few points raised, the shed has clearly been (re)designed with the LGB Stainz as a benchmark since the dimensions are exactly right for one to fit, using that cunning little annexe section as a hiding place for the coupler and hook. It's a heckuva squeeze though and smaller locos like the LGB Otto or the Davenport I intend to use are a better fit - literally - though the door heights then look a bit too high for those locos.

I can only agree that the opening mechanism defies the usual rules of mechanical engineering, but works surprisingly well. I think I'll add a strip of rubber to the piece of plastic to avoid any damage to the loco from rubbing.

 

[jameshilton]

Peter could you remove the brick base to drop the height a little, if you only intend to use it with the Davenport, although the doors would need modifying too I guess?

 

[Wobbleboxer]

I used to have an 'N' gauge shed with sprung doors the same as this. Worked very well albeit in the smaller scale they would often shoot smaller engines from the shed. They obviosuly hadn't scaled the spring mechanism down sufficiently.

 

[whatlep]

Peter could you remove the brick base to drop the height a little, if you only intend to use it with the Davenport, although the doors would need modifying too I guess?

That would certainly be possible James, though carving the doors would be a bit tricky since there wouldn't be a lot of plastic left close to the lower hinges. Not impossible though. My only real reservation is aesthetic. No half-decent builder would put up a wooden structure with the wood directly on the ground. Even your average garden shed is a few inches above terra firma to avoid instant rot!

 

[jameshilton]

True Peter, true - just have to make the Davenport taller then! hehe.
(mind, even my LGB/Liliput bash is no taller than the standard Davenport )