It seems that the Underground Ernie series of the trains based on the TV programme haven't proved to be the cash cow that Bachmann had hoped they would be. The range is being discontinued and the remains sold off for whatever can be realised. Sadly this happened just after people discovered that the "Ernie 1" vehicle had a really useful motor bogie underneath the plastic body.
Most of the stock has been dumped at TK Max stores and lucky people have been acquiring bogies for under 4 quid a pop. Many of these have found their way to eBay.
Birmingham's store didn't have the Ernie (if you have one to flog, let me know as I could use a couple) but it did have the trains themselves for a fiver a set. It's difficult to see in the box but I reasoned that if Bachmann had used standard parts to save money, this had to be a bargain. Since I could only fit 3 sets in my rucksack that's what I got. Each set consists of a powered unit and bogie trailer.
Back home I filled a pot full of screws taking the first unit to pieces. The result is in the photo. The vital statistics are:
Bogie wheelbase: 24mm
Wheel diameter: 10.5mm
Bogie centres: 69mm
The unit has a central motor which drives the gears via a cardan shaft (under 10mm long but easily extendable) that turns a non-swiveling large brass worm. This is coarse enough to drive the swiveling gears built into the bogie. There is a small circuit board attached which I think has a DCC thingy in it - experts would know better but there is an 8 pin board plugged in. All the wheels collect electricity using a split frame system.
Running is smooth and top speed isn't very high - possibly disappointing the kids. Pedants might think that the flanges are deeper than RP25 but no where near the only Lima "pizza cutters". The bogies components are basically the same for powered and unpowered items. One of my units has a broken clip in the power bogie so I'll do some swapping around to fix this properly.
There is an extra mechanism to make the eyes swivel. It's driven off the top of the worm and may well yield some useful gears for other projects.
As raw material for On30 projects this lot is well worth a fiver. Altering the mechanism to OO & HO diesels shouldn't be too hard either. The inner bogie chassis is 12mm over the sides so 14.2 3mm scale would be challenging but not entirely out of the question.
Yep, both the units and Ernie 1 have 8 pin DCC sockets. The latter seems to run a bit quieter but both are pretty amazing quality for the price.
ReplyDeleteI'm halfway through putting a 5.5mm scale body on my Ernie 1, which I will blog about in due course, and have a couple of units lined up for railcars. I understand the bogies should regauge quite easily as they use stub axles in a plastic spacer.