By Steve Gosling
Our new railway at Creech is proving to be a great focus for club activity and valuable facility for the membership. Much fun is being had all round. However, there are some people who are keen to run the railway but who have no access to motive power of their own. It has therefore been decided that the Club should have its own locomotive.

Various thoughts and discussions have taken place over the last eighteen months to define a specification for the machine and the following has now been agreed:

Locomotive will be capable of hauling a full three carriage train.

It must be available for instant use.

It must be simple to operate so that anyone can drive it with minimal instruction.

It must be robust and reliable.

It must be a recognisable model of at least semi-scale proportions.

These items have moved thoughts away from steam and in the direction of internal combustion or electric power. Last summer, our worthy chairman, editor and I had the great good fortune to visit a number of railways in Canada and the western USA. There we found a concept for a battery electric heavy hauler which it was felt would adapt nicely to our requirements.
The Canadian Locomotive
The Canadian “Trucks” with their four motors
This locomotive has been developed by Lindsay Macdonnell of the British Columbia Society of Model Engineers and consists, in principle, of two four-wheel bogies, or ‘trucks’ as they call them, with an 800W 24V motor mounted directly on each axle. The motor, which is British made, has an integral worm drive gearbox and is mounted with the motor axis vertical. The chassis frame is a single slab of 1” steel plate which combines a very simple construction with a lot of ballast to prevent the wheels from slipping. Four six volt batteries are contained within the body style of choice and the locomotive is driven from a position on the train via a 4QD controller. Performance is spectacular. I drove this locomotive with twenty five bogie vehicles on the back. I was told to ‘open it up’ so I gave it full throttle in one go. It took off so fast I slid down my seat! This locomotive also undertook a 24 hour run where it achieved a distance of 218 miles, albeit with a battery change.

It was felt that our locomotive must have a British outline and eventually, the conclusion was reached that it should be a class 35 ‘Hymek’ as these were almost exclusively used in the Westcountry and combine four wheel bogies with quite an attractive but not too complex body style. The amazing performance of the Canadian locomotives is a bit more than we need so we have decided to use only two motors and keep the cost down. Bogies are to be steel fabrications rather than castings so that they don’t look wrong and the body is to be from waterproof MDF. A few eyebrows were raised at this but the Landrover I made for the nieces and showed at the exhibition has demonstrated that an excellent finish is achievable with this material and I can vouch that it is very simple to generate complex shapes with it.

Interest in this locomotive has been such that three are to be made. Alec Hadfield has kindly volunteered to make up the buffers and these are now nearly complete. Noel Whiting is currently modifying some 12V tyre compressors into vacuum pumps to work the brakes and Andy Webb is machining wheels from steel on his CNC lathe. The bogies are being laid out ready for computer files to be created so that the components may be laser cut and the motors are now in stock.

One thing I must mention is that a whole collection of 00 scale railway equipment has been donated for sale for the benefit of the project. This very kind gift is helping us on our way and has been received with grateful thanks.

We hope to have the first locomotive running in 2008.