Thomas

[VirginiaCentral]

It's Christmas in January!  Thomas, Annie, and Clarabel arrived today!  I got a great price on a set from TRAINS, PLANS, AUTOMOBILES via ebay that was less that what the major distributors could do for me.  TPA made me an offer I couldn't refuse!

There was one problem with Thomas as he came out of the box.  Thomas was cross-eyed!  I didn't pay any attention to it at first, but when I set up the track and ran Thomas for the first time, there was a very audible clicking coming from the area behind Thomas' eyes.  I removed his face, repositioned his eyes and reinstalled his face with the eye operators in the proper position.  Now all is well with Thomas' eyes.

Annie & Clarabel look great too, but they can barely get around Bachmann's 2' radius track.  That's because the couplers don't swivel.  Some type of swiveling coupler arrangement such as the swiveling trucks used on Lionel's original version of Annie and Clarabel would be preferable.  Anybody out there up to creating an aftermarket swivel truck or swiveling couplers for Bachmann's Annie and Clarabel?

Bachmann's Annie and Clarabel are very nicely proportioned, coming in at 13 inches long, two inches longer than the Lionel version, but it would be nice if they had some interior seating and lighting.

Jerry

[vic]

Some have reported switching couplers to Bachmann knuckles, and that helped solve the issue, you could also remove the hook from the coupler on one side of each car so that only one hook couples. Having two hooks trying to work around a curve can sometimes interfer with each other, with only one hook their is alot more freedom of motion. On mine I'm considering an even more radical solution, namely replacing the wheels with trucks, which is actually the way the coaches were originally drawn.

[VirginiaCentral]

Thanks Vic, great suggestions.  Usually, I will just run on wider radius curves.  Minimum radius in my garden is 4'.  That should take care of most of the problems.  But I figured this would generate some interesting discussion which might be useful for the casual train runner. <G>

Jerry