Back in the early 1970s (I think) Lima produced a model of The New South Wales Government Railways C38 class pacific. It was of the non-streamlined version (of the 30 that were built, the first 5 were streamlined). It was a pretty good RTR model for its day, although it falls well short of present day standards. Perhaps the worst aspect of the model was that the tender was wrong. Rather than making a model of a C38 tender, Lima just reused another one from their existing range - from memory I think it was from an SNCF 141R, but I'm not sure. It has been well and truly eclipsed by the recent model from Australian Railway Models, which has been commented on in this forum. I used to have one, and have often regretted parting with it all those years ago. No more, as I just bought two of them. I saw two come up for sale on eBay at a low starting price and put in bids on each. One was an unlettered black one and the other a green lined one. I was expecting one or both to go for more than my maximum bid, otherwise I would only have bid on one, but bidding for both stopped just a few dollars under my last bid. They turned out to be in better condition than I was expecting. Here is the green one: As for the black one, I'm afraid I separated the body and chassis before I thought of taking a photograph, but here is one showing the locomotive and tender chassis. The driving wheels on the right have pick-ups, as do the tender wheels on the left, the tender being electrically linked to the locomotive by the drawbar. It looks like it should be pretty straightforward to convert it to 3 rail collection. I was surprised to see that the centre driver on these models was flanged - something I had obviously forgotten about. It's the rear driver that is geared to the motor and it has minimal side-play. The front driving wheels have a bit of side-play, but the centre ones have 3mm on each side.
They were excellent models and I still have two ! For a RTR model of the C38, it was welcomed ! I eventually semi detailed one and purchased the after market tender kit. The other I put the stream lining kit on. This one is the spare parts now as I prefer the one I semi detailed, painted black and lined red ! I ended up buying a brass model of the streamlined C38. It is still unpainted ! Now the ARM C38 is available and it's a good model, well detailed, except for that strange (stupid) Hornby style tender bogie set up... At least this can be remedied with the Cntrl P tender chassis kit ! Cheers, Gary.
Hey Gary, They don't look too bad at all and it sounds like you got a great deal. Keep this up and you will end up with the whole 30 locos !! And why not ... I would sure like to have 42 AD60 Garratts ... but at the moment I'm 40 short . Chris
Well, I have now finished converting 3820 to three rail, using a Marklin skate. I fitted non-insulated wheels to the tender so that the pick-up from the outer rails is on all eight tender wheels and three of the driving wheels.. After I tried it out I noticed that it's missing its traction tyre, so that's something else for me to sort out. In the meantime I still have 3830 to take care of. Here's a video of 3820 on the layout, sans traction tyre. As you can see, it has no difficulty negotiating a diamond crossing, perhaps the most troublesome piece of Dublo trackwork (my layout was originally going to have two of them but, thankfully, one was eliminated in the planning stages)
Well, I was not completely satisfied with the running qualities. I had changed the tender wheelsets for Dublo ones, mainly to improve current pickup, as uninsulated axles allow the wheels on both sides to pick up current at the same time (my layout is three rail, remember) but what I didn't realise was that the Dublo axle is slightly (probably only about 0.5mm) thinner than the Lima one, which gave the tender a noticeable wobble when the locomotive was in motion. I put up with this for a few months, but decided a few weeks ago to do something about it. I ended up buying two Dublo bogie well wagons, three rail, with metal wheels. These wagons have the advantage of having bogies that look passable under a locomotive tender (and, aside from their appearance, they are only about 1 or 2mm longer than the Lima ones) and are also fairly common, so it was easy enough to get two at a cheap price and from a vendor in Australia, so the postage was not excessive either. I removed the bogies by grinding away the rivets, and removed the couplers from two of the four bogies. After cleaning them up, I fitted them in place of the Lima bogies, with the result that the two locomotives run as well as they did before, but without the wobbling tender. And both tenders now have Dublo couplings, so I can run any of my rolling stock behind them. For some reason, the green one can pull more than the black one. The green one can take four Dublo coaches before it starts slipping, but the black one can only take three. Not really a problem though because, on my layout, anything more than four coaches looks too much.
