Testing ol' 99 on the test layout

When Donna dropped by yesterday she generously gave me a bag of N-scale rolling stock courtesy of her equally generous brother-in-law. I'm starting to work my way through the bag to see what's what and what works.

One of the more intriguing locomotives, especially for the Loonar Module, was this classic 0-4-0 dockside switcher. It was in a clear plastic box marked as Fleishmann product number 8053. I'm not sure if it's actually a Fleishmann product. It might simply be in the wrong box. I wonder if it's a Bachmann item? I'll need to investigate a little more.

Regardless, it ran quite well straight out of the box, so I hooked it up to two Roco #2309 open goods wagons which were also in the bag. Here's a clip of the train running over the worst section of track:

There's a little bounce, but it's ok as there's no derailment, even after many loops. It turns out there's a bit of ballast that needs chipping out to improve the ride. The 0-4-0 has deep flanges, so they found the sloppy ballasting problem.

The 0-4-0 is a nice size in comparison to the Minitrains HO-9 Gmeinder diesel.

Well, that wraps up the first test session on the test layout. Stay tuned.