The Lowe Over-rail 'Lectrocar, Mk. I

Experimentation into new casualized hybrids continues here at 30Squares Labs. Our last successful synthesis was the N₂HO^c compound, Ramsey's Garage. Our latest is the N₂S^c-9 vehicle derived from Thaddeus Lowe's personal electric rail car he used to tour and inspect his Mt. Lowe electric railway. In this case the elements to be synthesized are a Kato N-gauge drive unit, product #11-108, and a scratch built S-scale superstructure based on the aforementioned Thaddeus Lowe vehicle.

I won't go into a full how-to, but just hit a few highlights, and discuss a little bit about its design.

For reference, I used photos on pages 45 and 48 in Charles Seims' book, Mount Lowe: The Railway in the Clouds, published by Golden West Books in 1976. My copy is the 6th printing from 1993.

I chose S as the scale and 9mm as the gauge for a few reasons. 

The Kato drive unit looked about the right size when S scale figures stood beside it. It seemed too big for HO and too small for O. I should mention I settled on 9mm as the gauge because the Mt. Lowe inspired micro-layout I have in mind for this vehicle will have some sharp corners and steep climbs that I think only 9mm gauge track can handle.

There are going to be some automobiles in cameo appearances on the layout. Since many Hot Wheels and Matchbox toy cars are close to S, that scale seemed like a good choice for providing a variety of low cost, easily modifiable vehicles. 

None of these design choices were made in a flash of brilliance. I hummed-and-hawed for a long time about what to do. And all thinking about the vehicle's design was always weighed against the layout I wanted it to run on. If I had tried to build a true representation of Thaddeus Lowe's vehicle, I wouldn't be able to run it on a micro layout, well, at least one I was capable of building.

The Kato drive unit is more or less box stock. The only modification was to clip off the stock couplers and epoxy on Kadee HO scale ones. You can see in the photo that I cut off the magnetic guides that trail from the Kadees. Later the unit was painted with mixtures of acrylic rust and grey paints.

The superstructure was mocked up with cardboard to test some ideas about size. I find that when doing casualized models it's important to test the item's dimensions against figures. If the item looks ok with respect to figures, it's on its way to being a viable model. In this case I also compared the figures and mockups to the book's photos of the real vehicle with people onboard and standing nearby. In the end I settled on a deck 5' wide and 15' long, with an 8' tall centre pole to support the trolley pole. In the above picture the centre pole is only about 7' tall, and, again, after some more humming-and-hawing, I decided it was too short.

The deck is built up from styrene scraps that I felt looked right. I know this is a sacrilegious way to go about construction, but I didn't have any prototype dimensions to work with and so decided to make something that didn't look too bad with respect to the figures. The deck isn't glued to the power unit, it's a tight friction fit, which I rather like since it makes it easy to clean or replace the drive unit.

The truck side frames were built up with the same devil-may-care attitude. I drew the frame outline on a piece of card and glued up the side frames on it. They're styrene strip stock.

The rivet and nut-and-bolt details - those brown dotty things in the photo - are Tichy Train Group items. Yes, these are way too large. I think of them more as greeblies instead of detail. Like greeblies their purpose is to provide a suggestion of detail and surface texture instead of prototypically accurate representations of actual fasteners.

The control station baskets are built up from styrene strips and Aluminum Micro-Mesh from Scale Scenes. The mesh was initially held in place with dabs of Weld Bond, but later was sandwiched between styrene strips as the basket was built up.

The detail items were scavanged from a variety of sources. The trolley pole is from an unpowered Bachmann HO scale trolley. This is just a placeholder until the layout is built when I'll replace this pole with something more suitable to the layout's geometry. The brake wheels are brake wheels pried off two HO scale freight cars in my scrap box. Those springs, which when cut down are used as the front and rear springs on the car, are from a 1/24 scale AMT Moonscope kit.

Here's the superstructure being test fit on the drive unit. At this stage it's just about ready for painting. 

The centre pole is a piece of 1/8" diameter styrene tube. The poles on the ends of the control station baskets are 1/16" diameter styrene rod. Each brake wheel is connected to a piano wire shaft. Thread is used to cross tie the control basket poles. 

In the previous photo I said the car was about ready for the paint shop because after taking the photo I remembered I had left off the stake pockets. They are bent up from 0.003" thick brass strips and superglued to the deck's side frames. Some of those big bolt greeblies were then superglued on to give a hint of how the stake pockets were attached.

Finally, it was weathered a bit with thin washes of Revell Aqua Color stone grey and flat black. 

Here's a brief clip of the trolley running over a section of the Loonar Module. It can only run over a section because an S-scale vehicle is pretty big in an HO-scale world, even if it is narrow gauge :-)

New beginnings: Thaddeus Lowe's personal trolley in S-9

An S-scale, 9mm beginning for a trolley inspired by Thaddeus Lowe's. It's built on a Kato 11-108 drive unit.

The last two months I've been working on a diorama for entry in this Loco-Revue contest. It was submitted last week and graciously accepted, so now I'm back to normal operations :-)

The thing that surprised me about the diorama project was how fast I completed it and the enthusiasm I brought to the work. I started from zero on 26 February and finished on or around 19 April - and that included a 10 day excursion to Texas in the middle where no hobby work occurred. The project involved making 3 little dioramas, designing and scratchbuilding a building, scenicking, and modifying and detailing a locomotive, as well as shooting lots of photos, two videos, and packaging them for submission. I had a great time. The best in a long while. Most of my projects take ages and drag on. There's a message or two in there for me.

I think one of the messages is that I need to park most of my existing projects for a bit and focus on fun - well, let's say getting satisfaction from building, not 'fun' as the popular media defines it. I was doing many projects out of a feeling they needed to be done. Forget that. This summer could simply be a random walk looking for hobby fun, as well as enjoying any good weather that comes along of course.

I may have finally figured out how to build a little layout inspired by the Mt. Lowe railway. First though I need a model - in this case a casualized model - of Thaddeus Lowe's personal trolley that he used to scoot around his railway. I've made a start and I'll continue until the fun runs out.