#quietschie

And here's the other model railroad thing: A german class 426 train, model from Kato. Plus this time some white paper to make the lighting better, not sure how well it worked.

I bought this one as a kit at a model train show in Göppingen in September of last year. "Kit" meant a box containing all the components as spare parts, and a spare part order sheet as the "instructions". But, you know, it's Kato, it's really not that difficult.

What was difficult was getting DCC into the bloody thing. The official Kato way is to buy three different decoders, five if you want internal lighting to be DCC controlled, and shove them at various parts into the machine. Obviously I didn't want to do that, I have a Dremel and a soldering iron, so I did it myself, with one decoder (again the PD10MU that I also put in the FP7s and that was the reason for my rant about Bit.ly. There's nothing special about this decoder, it's just cheap and small and works well.)

The thing is that Kato's models are really intricately designed out of lots of cleverly interlocking plastic parts, and soldering a DCC decoder in requires undoing all of them and drilling holes. Some parts are just plain insane, like the motor contacts - if you solder anything to them directly, they'll come out of the motor. If you solder to the small copper strips that transmit the power directly, you'll have to find some way to isolate them because if you put them upside down, they won't conduct properly.

And then there's the fact that there's two parts of this, and of course I didn't want to use two decoders. Routing the wires through was not trivial.

Finally, at the last moment I decided they needed interior lighting, because I still had some Kato interior lighting kits from the Hiawatha. All Kato trains use the same light kit, which is great, except the light kit and the way it's integrated into the train can be very fiddly. In this train, you need to shorten a plastic light bar, lay it down on the roof, and then insert the chassis straight up so that the lighting part comes to sit right behind it. But you also need to push the chassis in diagonally forward, so the headlights come to rest in their proper holes. You need to push forward and straight up with no forward motion at the same time. The solution for me was to glue the light bar in place using adhesive pads, push the chassis in diagonally, then poke the lighting assembly with a long wooden stick until it lands in the right position, then finish closing. I don't think that's right.