#model railways

Talyllyn arrived today!

It's my birthday today!! And for it, I got a model TfW Class 67!!!!!! It's one of Seren's siblings, but until I can get them properly renumbered from 67014 to 67025, I'm just pretending it's him hehehehe :3

GUYS LOOK LOOKIT LOOK LOOKIT LOOK LOOK

VICKY WORKING ON OUR MODEL RAILWAY

I SPENT LIKE A MONTH ON THE BG AND THEN COMMED MY MATE KIT (rat_bladder on ig) FOR THE CHARACTER AAAAAAAA

That's not a short key smash, but my newest model railroad locomotive. Well, sort of.

ASF stands for "Akkuschleppfahrzeug", "Battery tractor vehicle". More than 500 of these little guys were built in the GDR as shunting tools between 1966 and 1990, both for the railroads there and industry, plus quite a few got sold to other eastern bloc countries (in particular Poland) as well. Nowadays they've spread around more, with some even appearing in Italy and Sweden.

The ASF is designed to push and pull single rail cars or sometimes entire locomotives within workshops and industrial sites, a job that it has been doing well for decades now. The diminutive size (about 3 meters long, wide and tall) means it'll fit anywhere, and in places where daily journeys are often measured in hundreds of meters at most, its 6 kilometres per hour top speed (4 mph) is not really an issue.

Technically, it's not a locomotive but a "device", which means it's subject to far less strict requirements for maintenance and for operator training. With all of that, it should be no surprise that it will never be seen on the mainline; even shunting in stations is an extreme rarity. The job is more to pull something into or out of a workshop. Modern devices for that are typically all remote controlled, but plenty of places also just use an old ASF.

And now it's also available in N scale. And it's just incomprehensibly tiny.

This is produced by Arnold, a brand name of Hornby's, and it actually came with DCC preinstalled. It's adorable and I love it.

But how does it run? Actually way better than you'd think.

The loop of track is a "JokeTrack", hand-made from Japan, that I want to use for something eventually one of these days. As you can see, minimum radius is not really a concern for this locomotive.

Two axles really close together and almost no weight means that electricity pickup isn't great; it'll basically only run on freshly cleaned tracks. But it's way better than it has any right to be, since the decoder comes with two relatively beefy buffer capacitors that are stored in the top of the cab. Still, it's really great at finding whatever particles you have on your tracks and stopping for them.

The top with factory decoder settings is really, really low. Probably exactly the 6 km/h walking pace translated to 1:160 scale. I may bump that up, because realism is one thing, but it takes forever to get anywhere.

The weird hooks are the end are what Arnold has given it instead of normal N scale couplings. They look horrible against a white background, but visually disappear entirely once you're on the actual layout.

If you don't like them, purely decorative replacements that look like the original weird coupler thingies are included in the tiny box. I suppose you could install one of them on one end, and have the other end to haul a car if you want. For me that's too much planning.

Speaking of, it can haul more cars than you'd think in a straight line, but once you get to a curve, it quickly drops down to just one, if at all (also heavily dependent on the car). Sadly the tiny coreless motor in it can and will stall at times, which can damage it if you keep it going for too long, so it's better to keep an eye on it while in motion.

There is no sound, the only function is the marker light. Historically locomotives engaged in shunting were supposed to only turn on the right headlight in every direction as a marker. Nowadays mainline locomotives will turn on all three lights on both ends while shunting, but the ASF was built before that, and since all it can do is shunt, it just received the marker light. F0 turns it on in the direction travel, F1 turns on the opposite end.

As it's nearly Christmas, I thought I'd take a brief break from the Model Town marathon to share something a little more festive.

It's no secret that for all he talks about cars and motorsport, James May has a soft spot for trains, and model railways especially. He first shared this interest with the world in 2005 with James May's Top Toys, a documentary in which he explored some of his favourite childhood toys, and discovered which ones still had a place in the modern world.