O Scale Trains Magazine Online

Photo 1: Power and dummy units side by side. Note the vast amount of plastic
that had to be cut away to install the CLW conversion drive.
Photo 2: Power unit undercarriage and body showing the styrene strips
glued to the undersides of the trucks.
Photo 3: Close-up of the diaphragms between the units and the new wire handrails.
sprayed with Testors Silver, and the cab window frames
were carefully painted with dull aluminum using a small
flat brush. The rigid plastic diaphragms between the units
were removed and flexible rubber ones from Precision
Scale were installed in their place.
Installing the CLW gear-drive axles in the power trucks
proved to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. The
conversion kit did not include any instructions for adapting
the new axles and gears into the Rivarossi trucks.
Owners of these Diesels know that Rivarossi designed the
power trucks with built-in motors which are rather puny
and noisy. Converting them to take the CLW axles and
gearboxes was (for me) impossible. The only parts usable
were the truck sideframes. I removed these from the
motor units, and drilled out the axle holes to take short
pieces of brass tube which became bearings for the axles.
The biggest challenge was getting the conversion kit
bolsters attached to the truck sideframes. Using a drill
press and an end mill, I carefully milled out an area in the
center of each frame to take a 1/16” thick piece of phenolic.
This, in turn, had a hole bored through it to take a
short piece of brass tube that exactly fit through the hole
in the bolster. The tube was epoxied through the hole in
the phenolic and this assembly was epoxied to each side
frame. With this accomplished, the sideframes were rejoined
around the axle units and the bolsters snapped into
the brass tube. Short pieces of Evergreen square styrene
tube were used to re-enforce the joints where the frames
were glued back together. Pieces of 0.040” styrene sheet
were glued across the bottoms of the sideframes for rigidity.
It worked! However, there was now no power pickup
as the CLW gear drives are non-conductive. I could have
made some brass wipers to pick up current through the
axles, but it was far easier to let the dummy A-unit do the
job. Its original Rivarossi trucks and wheels were retained
but with the motors and worms removed. The pickups
and headlight were wired through a Miniatronics four-pin
mini plug-and-socket to the motor in the other A-unit.
Since the units can never be operated separately, I used a
simple drawbar coupling between them, rather than normal
couplers.
Sometime during the course of this now-complex project,
I got the idea to put a mini-TV camera in the nose of
the non-powered unit as there were gobs of space inside
the body. At the same, time I envisioned making the loco
battery powered and radio controlled. Having had many
years experience with scale model R/C boats, I had the
components on hand to try this, which I did... and it
worked, but not well enough. The speed-direction control
unit I used wasn’t very sensitive to low speed running, and
there was too much interference in my train room for the
transmitter and receiver to work without “glitching”. So
it was back to track power, but I still thought the camera
idea was feasible as I had seen these tiny mini-cams demonstrated
at train shows. The unit I purchased is available
from many hobby sources. The mini-TV camera sends a
signal to a small receiver which, in turn, is plugged into
the “video in” socket on a TV set. Everything needed to
run the unit is included except for a 9V battery to power
the camera and the TV set, of course. If it is desired to use
track power for the camera, an adapter is available.
To provide a scale looking opening in the Diesel’s nose
for the camera lens, I used a left over Mars light from my
F-unit kit. This was cut down so it would match the area
of the door in the C-Liner’s nose, which was then carefully
July/Aug ’06 - O Scale Trains • 61