As the the time to start laying track approaches it’s time to look at the motive power.

Most of this stuff has been collected over the years but has hardly ever been out of their boxes. When I can, I like to get stuff that is either closely associated with the Plymouth and west Devon area, or at least could have reasonably been found there on occasions.

The engines will eventually be fitted with DCC, but now require running in to make sure their mechanisms run smoothly and without issues

I achieve this on my DCC programming track, although for this process I use 12v DC via a regular old school controller. Since running a loop isn’t practical the engines run on Bachmann EZ Riders, basically, a miniature rolling road.

This time I’m running three of my smaller engines. Two ex-GWR steam engines – 1363 0-6-0ST and 1470 0-4-2T, and a privately owned 0-4-0 Sentinel diesel.

I run the locos for about 20 minutes in each direction at a moderate speed I estimate to be no faster that that particular prototype might reasonably run at. Towards the end of each session I up the the rate to eleven for a minute or so and then down to the slowest possible, for a couple of minutes, looking for a very smooth low speed.

In this case I had to run the Sentinel on its own, because, even though it was just run in, and not yet even on the much more controllable DCC, it runs very slowly and smoothly indeed, probably below scale walking pace. Pretty impressive!

This trio, being quite short wheel-based tended to waddle a little. I’m not too bothered about that because in reality the prototypes tended to do that as well, so, no problem.

Well, it was fun. The next time I look at these it will be time to install DCC.

Slow running from Hornby Sentinel – 12v DC