Project 620

This has been one of those idea's i'd had floating around in the back of my head for several years now, but was always dropped into the "too hard basket".

For some reason (maybe an act of madness), I finally decided to get stuck into building an SAR 620 class light pacific. Now, unfortunatley there's no RTR chassis (that i'm aware of anyway) that had the right wheelbase and driver size for the 620, however the old Mehano USRA light pacific (later IHC) was "that close" with wheel spacings about 3mm too far apart - nothing a bit of surgery couldn't fix. More on that later.

I started work on the superstructure first - the lads at Rocky River Models kindly provided me a 720 class cab, two 720 class tender bodies, some marker lights, smoke box door and water treatment equipment castings (Thanks Stu and Peter). The body quickly took shape over a period of three weekends - working in styrene actually made this process easier.


The loco body takes shape

Fast forward a few weeks, and the mechanism had been fitted, and is in the process of having the unique baker valve gear assembled.



Having managed to get rid of a slight bind that was annoying the say the least, the drivers side valve gear is almost complete - just have to fabricate the gear hanger, to enable me to add the eccentric crank and rods.

More to follow.