Another New Locomotive Arrives

The S&C's new American at the head of Train No. 6 ready to depart from Oakdale. The passenger cars are brass imports by Beaver Creek.

The local passenger trains are on the S&C are made up of brass imported cars which are very heavy. Although my smaller 4-4-0s can pull four of these cars, it's about all they can do. I wanted to come up with a slightly heavier, more modern engine which can pull a little more. My choice was the Bachmann Spectrum Richmond 4-4-0. As manufactured, it represents a loco of about 1910 where I wanted one a little older.

The tender is from the Bachmann Baldwin 4-4-0 which looks better for the time period of the railroad.

 I began my conversion by removing the stack, domes and generator. The domes were replaced with Precision Scale domes which are more of a Baldwin style. The stack was replaced with a capped stack just because I like capped stacks. All of my locos use oil headlamps so this was replaced and, of course, the dynamo was no longer needed. I swapped the original tender out with the tender from the Spectrum Baldwin 4-4-0 and removed the DCC decoder with which it was equipped. This was replaced with a Tsunami TSU-750 and a sugar cube speaker. The engine was then painted and lettered to suit the railroad's management receiving the name San Joaquin in the process. San Joaquin is the California county in which most of the railroad runs.
 

The engineer, appropriately attired with a derby hat and 20-past-8 mustache appears competent enough with a husky fireman keeping up the steam. The engine crew is from Musket Miniatures.

Overall, the conversion was not too bad. The loco comes apart easily and is readily modified as long as one is willing to do a bit of filing and drilling here and there.