The box of East German TT trains have been hanging around for a while so a couple of days ago, we decided to have a proper look with a view to handing the whole lot over to a dealer. In an effort to secure a decent offer, all the locos were checked to see if they worked.
As it turned out, despite being dusty, with a bit of prodding from some 12V DC, they all did. We soon had little engines running around a 2ft diameter circle on the dining table. All good fun.
Looking under the BR 107 engine, I spotted that the makers had been rather clever.
While it might look as though the engine runs on a pair of bogies, it's a fraud. In reality, the mechanism is a simple 4-wheel unit with the outer bogie wheels swinging around like pony trucks on a steam engine. Given the limited swing of the bogies and crudeness of all the running gear (those treads are huge) everything looks like it should.
I'm not sure if this helps anyone but I bet there are some narrow gauge fans out there who could use a similar trick.
Eash German modela and toys often had interesting solutions to practical problems. I'll have to store that one away for future use (assuming I manage to build something sometime soon)
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