Adding Symoba NEM Pockets & Kadee Couplings to Hornby Railroad Class 06

Following on from my experiment to convert the Hornby Railroad Class 06 to DCC, I'd been happily running it around an oval layout at a highly non-prototypical (or is that protoatypical?) speed when I realised that to actually do shunting with my Bachmann and Piko wagons in any kind of meaningful way, it would need further modification.

Since reading Model Rail's NEM coupler test report, I've gone a bit Kadee mad, fitting them to almost everything in sight. Okay, due to limited funds, I do generally just fit them to one example of each wagon, but that's an easy process, and easy to reverse.

Which brings me to the Railroad Class 06, which, unlike my more expensive HO Piko loco, doesn't have NEM pockets. For the uninitiated, NEM pockets are little boxes that hold the coupling, and which make it easy to interchange couplings as you wish.

The Class 06, however, has a Lima style D ring. Luckily, it's in plastic.


Clearly, if I was going to Kadee-ify the Class 06, I'd first have to get rid of the Lima D rings (oh, yes, front and back) and replace them with something capable of taking the Kadees.


(For those wondering, I use Kadee rather than the clever Brian Kirby 'BK' magnetic uncoupling solution on my inglenook-inspired shunting layout because I take advantage of the delayed uncoupling feature. More on that another time.)


It turns out that Symoba made the exact pieces that I needed : a NEM pocket and adapter to hold it. The NEM socket was cheap. The adapter, because of the little springs inside it to handle cornering, and the engineering of the whole thing was not quite so cheap!


At this point, a photo would be useful, but again, I didn't take any, so you'll have to take a look at the official Symoba web site. When I do another hatchet-job on a Railroad, I'll post up the photos. Promise.


Back to the conversion. Take a knife, and remove the D-rings. Prise out the little bobbing arm thingy, and take a deep breath.


At this point, I thought it would be an easy enough job : just cut enough of the chassis away to accommodate the mounting plate for the adapter, and glue it in place, plastic to plastic.


Wrong!


In fact, you have to cut the chassis right back to the metal underside, otherwise you can't get the NEM pocket high enough up the sprung mounting pole to meet the height of the other couplings on the rolling stock. 

I tried every which way, swore, sweated, and then un-glued the mounting plate to give it another go. Cutting back to the metal does the job, on the Class 06, but I can't vouch for other locos. Either way, the sprung pole is long enough that it doesn't really matter how far into the chassis area the adapter is mounted.


And that's it. I got a piece of rail, put a NEM/Kadee-ified wagon on it, and used that to measure the height of the pocket, which slides onto the mounting pole. That's a tight fit, so be sure to only push it up the pole gradually, as going the other way might just tear the mounting plate away from the chassis of the loco.

Now, the running tally of the cost of the Class 06 is as follows:

• Loco : £20
• DCC chip : £11
• NEM pockets : £1
• NEM adapters : £6
• Total : £38

The closest thing to that would be Bachmann's admittedly excellent Class 03 (or Class 08's) which are around £50-54, and would need a DCC chip fitting, for a total of, at most £65. They are better runners, allegedly, but I'll find that out when I get myself one at the Folkestone MRC2011 Exhibition in October.

Routine Locomotive Maintenance

Running a model railroad is often just like the real thing. Many model railway enthusiasts will freely admit that getting the operations as close to reality as possible, with timetables, running orders, randomly occurring events, and so on, is all part of the attraction.

Just like real trains, model trains will eventually need some kind of maintenance, as will the tracks. Now, I'm not talking about major things here - such as switching to DCC, rerouting lines, or adding scenery - but about the little things.

Trains pick up dirt, often in places that are, at first, invisible. For example, a poster on the NewRailwayModellers forum pointed to an intermittent issue with a Bachmann Class08 not running smoothly, or indeed at all.

The suggestions (upheld) were that there was a build up of grime on the wiper pickups, which need to be cleaned routinely, by removing the wheels.

It's this kind of routine maintenance that can be made part of the operations by creating a works timetable to note when the last check was done of each loco, wagon and carriage, and what changes have been carried out. For those who already keep a logbook for each loco, this is just a natural extension of that.

For the rest of us, maybe it's about time we started to get real!

Top Tip for Corrugated Surfaces

I was reading September's Model Rail and was particularly interested in an article about making corrugated iron sheets. Now, Paul A. Lunn suggests using a Modelscene corrugated panel as a kind of template, pressing a piece of thick aluminium foil (such as from a takeaway tray) down onto the panel so that it picks up the corrugated form.

The advantages are clear - weathering and distressing a piece of foil is way easier than doing the same on a piece of plastic, which is far removed from the kind of surface that is being modelled. For complete instructions, Model Rail is probably still available on the news stands, if not they might have a back issue service, and this particular tip is in Issue 160, September 2011.

Now, the reason that this interested me was that I don't have any Modelscene corrugated panels. However, what I do have are:

• toothpicks
• matchsticks
• cardboard

The thought occurred to me that I could replicate the corrugated panels by gluing either toothpicks or matchsticks to the cardboard, and then pressing the foil between two of these makeshift panels. Other bits and pieces can also probably be used - toothpicks give a rounded edge, matchsticks a square one, but there are probably other possibilities to explore.

I look forward to seeing your efforts, and will be posting my own as I perfect the technique. A big thanks to Paul. A Lunn and the folks at Model Rail for the initial spark!