I found a bunch of little flat cars with Civil War mortars and cannonballs on them very cheap, so of course I had to buy them to make a civil war train.
In that era, locomotives were high-stepping 4-4-0s and maybe even 5’ gauge in certain locales. The obvious loco to pull them is a Kalamazoo/Hartland 4-4-0, which is a 1/24th compromise size that looks kinda like a std gauge engine.
So I found a Kalamzoo 4-4-0 in an auction with a bunch of New Bright cars that now reside with Vic.
and when I tried to make it work, I found it had a bad motor, and the plastic was brittle and bits broke. Not only that, it had only 4 wheel pickups on the driving wheels, and it was missing a headlight.
All along I had noticed that the Hartland version, made after HLW bought up Kalamazoo, had nice spoked driving wheels. And lo, one turned up in an auction!
Lack of a front truck was no big deal, as I had the other Kalamity-#1 truck. So that became the primary for the Civil War train, and it was fitted with r/c+battery control (thread around here somewhere.) It ran like a champ at Jim K’s along with a wooden stock car I found and a Delton shortie boxcar.
Another auction popped up (who was it told me that you can search all of Hibid for g scale? I’ll shoot him!) This time locally, and they wouldn’t ship, so we had a pleasant drive to Lewes for lunch, picking up a complete Kalamazoo Empire set for $20.
Selling the freights paid the cost of this, so the Kalamity 4-4-0 #2 hit the test bed, and hardly ran. But the motor sounded like it was working, so I stripped it down. Yes the motor worked. No, the gears didn’t - cracked like a good Bachmann 4-4-0 (must be contagious?)
Ah, but Kalamity #1 had good gears and a bad motor, so it got taken apart again [I can strip the motor out of a Kalamazoo 4-4-0 and put it back together in 30 minutes these days!] The gears were transferred to #2, and I got a lesson in how to quarter the axles - as you take the gears out, you lose the alignment. So you have to put them back in the right place. Note on this pic the flats on the axles are being aligned, and note the nice TRW made-in-the-USA motor.
(The other thing to watch on a Kalamity 4-4-0 is that the pickup brushes and springs will fall out when you remove the wheels. You learn to be careful. . .)
Now I had a working Kalamazoo 4-4-0, but I already sorted and preferred the HLW, so this one went on the block. I had to dig another headlight out of the junk box - I think it came from an AMT “General” plastic kit. It sold in a moment.
While all this was going on, a gentleman on MLS was updating a Kalamazoo 4-4-0 to make it prettier. He said he had 3 of them, 2 junked, inherited from his brother. I had asked for a junked one weeks ago, thinking it might have parts I could use to get Kalamity #1 working. Shipping it from CA cost $40, which was more than I paid for the other 2! It turned up yesterday, and has a headlight!
Having a spare 30 minutes this morning, I stripped out the motor block and inspected the internals. Despite it being classed as ‘junk’, the motor worked fine. The I noticed - it was an LGB Buehler motor!! Appears to be the classic short-shaft, double ended LGB motor used in moguls, etc.
The gears seemed fine, so I put it all back together. I think the worms are slightly smaller than the original motor, and maybe the gears are worn, but the back end can slip and not run. Once it was complete, with the rods keeping the wheels in sync, it ran fine - as well as these things run anyway.
While I only got a ‘junk’ engine with no tender, you may notice in my first pic, hiding at the back, a green tender which is now in my spare collection and presumably works with this Kalamity #3. I know the headlight doesn’t work - not only are the wires cut below the headlight but the wires pulled out of the boiler when I took the motor block out, normally they have to be unsoldered. This loco has has a hole drilled in the smokebox on the other side, which requires investigation. Maybe next week!
