Finescale modellers should look away now. If you want a long wheelbase chassis to traverse a 7ft diameter curve, this is the sort of work that has to be carried out on the chassis.
The driven wheels are fine. No problems there. These start when we want to get the radial truck to swivel, or rather, swivel enough to stay on the track. The chassis as designed uses a pony truck within the frame sides to replicate what can otherwise be a complicated item to build. I suspect that the designer hadn't envisaged such tight curves, although he did narrow the frames a bit at this point to assist. Not everyone can build a model where the track is very nearly straight after all !
Anyway, it wasn't enough for the home this locomotive will be heading to so more drastic work was required. The frames have been chopped where the pony truck starts using a piercing saw to just leave the flat part that screws to the body. Behind the pony, everything has been removed and will be mounted on the body after suitable modification to keep it out of the way and let me insert a draft box into that tank.
Back on the layout, the mods worked well. Apart from one area of fiddle yard, the loco trundled around happily and the problem area was most likely a track issue rather than a rolling stock one.
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