Engineers side view of my rebuilt Bachmann Southern american type locomotive. This project will result in a good representation of a DSS&A 100 series american type engine.
Firemans side view. I added styrene trim work to the cab to give it the appearance of a wood cab. The domes, bell, stack and headlight are PSC castings. The injector piping, whistle and sander valves were salvaged from the Bachmann model.
The next step will be modifying the tender. The challenge here will be to fit in the batteries, DCC sound decoder, speaker, and wireless receiver. I guess I did not mention that the layout that you see the engine on is being built as dead rail, so I need an appropriate engine for use on it. It has been a pleasant experience not having to wire track, one I highly recommend.
This is the electronics package in the tender. There are a lot of goodies packed into a small space. A Tam Valley radio, Tsunami 750 decoder, speaker, reed switch and controller circuit, and a pair of 110maH Sparkfun LiPo batteries. The radio antenna is the curved red wire that lays over the top of the components. The tender shell snaps in place so you do not have to remove screws to change the cells, of course you do have to be careful to pick up the tender by holding the frame not the shell sides.
I have done a little testing on performance. So far I have found that I can perform stop/start switching, pulling four freight cars, for about 30 minutes on one set of charged batteries. It will be interesting to see if this goes up as I put more duty cycles on the batteries. If it could get to 45 minutes that would be ideal as it takes about 45-60 minutes to charge a pair of cells.
